Wait... Older genres? Never thought of it that way but it is true that there are some new ones. When is a genre old? 20 years, 30 years?

If you don't like Hollow Knight by the time you get to the big tower in the center of the city, you aren't going to like HK. Been a minute, but by then you should have one or two mobility skills and have fought 2 or 3 bosses.

The game REALLY opens up when you get even more mobility skills and has some of the best traversal in my opinion. And the bosses... I think a lot of the bosses are samey and meh (unless you fight the hard modes) but the "DLC" areas are REAL good.

But yeah. If you aren't vibing by the time you are climbing the tower then you just don't like it. And that is perfectly fine.

The biggest tip to newbies though: Listen for the sound of someone muttering and look for paper on the ground. That is how you find the map merchant. I think it is immensely stupid that you have to find the map merchant to get an area map but... that is the game.

It also doesn't click for me at first but when it click it click. I have to spend i think about 1 or 2 hours playing it not enjoying it, and then the game just suck me in till i wander every corner of it, played it twice to get a good ending.

But if it doesn't click, i think it just isn't for you.

After the first boss fight. The game then removes your training wheels and you do whatever you want, in whatever order you want.

It tough at the beginning until you get the hang of it, like playing Doom on Nightmare mode.

I’m enjoying following a walkthrough just to know where to go.

I doubt it was under $200k. Paying 3 devs for 7 years is likely $75-100k each per year, or around $700k on just their salaries, which they paid with their sales from HK. Then they had to pay the composer, localizers, bug testers, etc etc. it’s definitely still low budget, but not as much as the first one.

It's funny that Hollow Knight is also in top 20 on Steam right now with 50k players.

I dont understand what you're trying to argue. The person you responded to made a point about Major studios trying to make a hit... but focusing on business principles over actual game production.

You responded by boiling it down to "Devs should make better games" which wasn't close to approaching the point they were making.

My point was that devs are not always the ones in control, and trying to simplify a point about business majors running studios into the ground is somehow about the development team being bad is missing the point by a parser.

No one said Team Cherry was a AAA studio. At this point of the comment chain, no one had said anything about them at all until you brought it up. No one is trying to disparage your fanboyism.