The announcement of Hollow Knight Silksong's release date just two weeks ago sent other indie games absolutely running, but one dev that stuck to its guns and released its shooter on the very same day was handsomely rewarded.
That dev is Riddlebit Software, which just launched a gorgeous, cel-shaded, parkour-fueled FPS called Jetrunner that describes itself as "Trackmania meets Titanfall." Jetrunner obviously looks and sounds cool as hell, though that's not enough to grab everyone's attention these days, which is why developer u/OliverMagnus explained the team were "scared as hell" in a recent Reddit post.
"We were scared as hell when Silksong was announced to release on our day," they wrote. "Now it seems it was a blessing in disguise. From the stats we've read 70% of all indie games slated to release this week were delayed. Thanks to it the Popular Upcoming section and now New and Trending tab became free real estate."
The exodus of other games on Steam caused Jetrunner's wishlists to double in "the last week alone" thanks to the extra visibility, "and now that we're finally out we actually managed to land New and Trending on Steam, something that we couldn't even have dreamed of a week ago."
And to nicely poke fun at how Team Cherry basically broke multiple storefronts, the dev hoped Valve could quickly "fix their servers so people can actually buy our game. (And so I can buy Silksong.)"
Essentially, Silksong caused other games to move, which in turn made more room for Jetrunner to breathe. Funny how that works, huh? Still, those delayed games weren't wrong to run away either - Hollow Knight Silksong has been massive by any metric. It managed to court over 500,000 concurrent players on Steam, making it one of the biggest launches of all time and we haven't even seen how it fares on its first weekend yet.
