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The Nextlander Podcast 213: The Garbage-to-Gold Ratio

🕑 Added 2025-08-27 23:06:18 +0000 UTC

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William Canzoneri

Just joined the Patreon! Used to listen to you guys in college - and launching my freelance media career I’ve been putting off for years! Hope one day to meet you guys who helped inspire me or even work for you.

R. Ballien

To be clear: Team Cherry deserves the financial success they've found for making something a great many people love. I am, however, very wary of the "oh, they're just little uwu pixies who want to spread joy!" defense here: we *are* talking about adults old enough to have a sense of professional responsibility (see the Polygon editorial today), and they have, if only out of sheer obliviousness, created a difficult situation for some smaller devs who are already dealing with a monstrous industry outlook. That would incur a great deal of criticism for nearly any other party. (The team showed a similar obliviousness with the radio silence surrounding Silksong for so long, when all they had to do was post a brief "still working, thanks!" update every so often; yes, some people were being obnoxious, but the team did have a formal financial responsibility to its Kickstarter backers it was, again, ignoring.) The answer there, typically, is "Team Cherry made HOLLOW KNIGHT; they don't owe anyone anything!!!" That's an answer that boils down to: "they're entitled to treat people however they want because they made a lot of money." That's an argument I can't imagine the same parties making in any other context.

R. Ballien

"They seem *happy.*" Yeah, people who don't care about the repercussions of their actions on others often are. (As Alex notes, I imagine the money helps, too.)