Last week, a three-person business in Adelaide made US$24 million on its launch day, surpassed two million in sales, and crashed multiple digital storefronts. If this were a ‘traditional’ Australian startup, the industry would be having a meltdown and the LinkedIn think pieces would peak. But it was a video game, Hollow Knight: Silksong.
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It was one of the most explosive indie launches the world has seen and just the latest proof that Australia needs to start treating video games as a high-growth export sector.
Silksong’s launch last week was nothing short of seismic. At the time of writing, the game boasts 330,668 active players on Steam. At its peak over the weekend, it hit over 587,000 concurrent users.
Sales estimates suggest Silksong has already sold between 2.09 and 2.12 million copies on Steam alone in its opening days. This places Silksong squarely among the top 20 most-played games in the platform’s history.
That’s an incredible achievement for a studio that launched the original Hollow Knight from a $57,000 Kickstarter campaign back in 2017. From there, it sold over 15 million copies.
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The scale of Silksong’s premiere by comparison was exponential. Steam, Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox all struggled under user demand at the time of release.
Twitch viewership pushed past 360,000, helping to drive three million hours watched in just its first day. Total sales across all platforms are widely estimated to have exceeded one million units within 24 hours.
That, coupled with the aforementioned day-one revenue figure of US$24 million, is a staggering return for any startup or small business, let alone an independent studio hailing from South Australia.
What makes Silksong’s success most remarkable is its context: this is not an outlier, but the continuation of a pattern.
Over the last decade, Australian indie studios have quietly and repeatedly proven that global-scale innovation and blockbusting financial results are well within reach for local creators starting with startup-style teams, lean budgets, and bold ambition.
So why aren’t we investing in them?
Why indie games are a huge investment opportunity for Australia
Melbourne’s Cult of the Lamb has made over US$90 million since launch. Image: Steam.
Silksong’s eye-watering success is just the latest example of how Australia’s indie games sector isn’t merely creative, it’s a serious commercial engine with global reach.
The worldwide video game market is now valued at US$466 billion, with forecasts predicting US$196 billion in direct revenue each year by 2026. It’s far outpacing film and music. The sector’s margins and growth strike at rare consistency, delivering strong returns even in years when other export or media categories stall.
Local Australian indies are making the most of these global opportunities. While one might argue that Silksong was a highly anticipated sequel to 2017’s Hollow Knight, Team Cherry isn’t the only local success story.
Cult of the Lamb, created by Melbourne studio Massive Monster, sold one million units in its first week, has now topped 4.5 million units globally, and generated over US$90 million in revenue. This has made it the best-selling IP of all time for its publisher, Devolver Digital.
This commercial and critical success, driven by a small team and originally enabled by a $40,000 grant from VicScreen, demonstrates the powerful leverage smart seed funding can have.
Untitled Goose Game, by Melbourne’s House House, sold over 100,000 copies in its first two weeks, cleared one million copies within three months, and is now estimated to have surpassed 2.04 million lifetime sales across platforms.
Untitled Goose Game sold over 100,000 copies in its first two weeks. Image: Steam.
Hipster Whale’s Crossy Road, which reinvented ad-driven mobile game economics in 2014, reached over 50 million downloads in just its first three months and has now clocked more than 200 million downloads, with more than US$10 million in reported in-app purchase revenue in its opening quarter alone. And this isn’t counting its substantial ad revenue streams.
Yet what’s most striking is that all of these results are achieved with a fraction of the investment and incentives that we afford to other Australian startups — whether through government grant programs or the record billions flowing from venture capital into tech, fintech and health innovation each year.
Early-stage funding routinely delivers millions for SaaS, while games studios often make do with five-figure grants and rare early-stage backing. The last time I checked, games firmly fit into the SaaS category Australian investors have long-favoured
This local constraint is magnified even further when compared with the robust grants, offsets and industry support available to indie studios in the likes of North America and Europe, where games are treated as a foundational digital export and a wellspring for future IP and jobs.
The benefits of backing indie games also radiate across other creative and technology industries. Australian developers regularly collaborate with R&D, art, music, animation, and software sectors. They’re contributing code, tools, soundtracks, and interactive design skills that boost the broader digital economy.
Australia’s own games industry generated $339.1 million in 2024, 93% of which was international revenue. This places local independent studios among the country’s highest-performing creative exporters.
These studios aren’t just putting up strong launch numbers; they’re building long-tail IP, attracting global streaming and fan communities, and reinvesting their earnings to create new jobs and upskilling in local digital economies.
The funding gap failing games: Australia’s fastest growing creative sector
Image: Steam
Despite these world-class results, the reality for Australia’s game startups is that pathways for support remain mismatched with their contribution and potential. Especially in NSW.
The NSW Independent Developer Survey 2025, conducted by State of Play, revealed that 95%of NSW indies said funding was their number one need.
Of those surveyed, 73.7% had considered moving to states like Victoria or Queensland, where government support is measured in hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) per project, not in five-digit seed checks.
The Made in NSW fund currently offers just $30,000 in seed funding per game, compared with up to $500,000 available through VicScreen and an expanding grants pipeline in Queensland.
This under-resourcing has measurable consequences. Studios responding to the survey reported median game development budgets of $150,000, almost all spent on salaries, contractors, and the basic costs of doing business.
The report also showed the market’s appetite for investment is immense. In the seven years following the introduction of even modest federal and state tax rebates, the number of registered game companies in NSW more than doubled, and games industry employment in the state soared by 4.7 times.
The situation, ironically, is not one of untapped potential but of missed opportunities. Australian studios have shown they know how to make global hits. The challenge isn’t a creative or skills-based gap. It’s systemic.
Only 1% of Screen NSW funding goes toward games, even as industry revenues for digital games exponentially outpace those of film and music combined.
Each of Australia’s indie success stories began not as a swaggering conglomerate but as a tightly run, high-risk, high-reward startup — exactly the kind of business Australia’s policymakers profess to champion.
The State of Play survey found studio founders overwhelmingly want to stay and build at home, but, as things stand, lack the support to do so on an equitable footing with their interstate or international competitors.
Government strategy must shift. Grant and production funding parity with other states is essential, as is a significant boost to the visibility, accessibility, and speed of support programs.
Just as crucial is the need to activate greater private investment, whether from venture capital, family offices, or corporate partnerships.
For a sector generating hundreds of millions and exporting over 90% of its output, Australia’s games industry is overdue for serious capital backing from investors seeking the next global creative tech success story.
Australia’s studios, game startups if you will, are ready to lead the world. But the support they receive must match the scale of their ambition. Hollow Knight: Silksong’s incredible global success is a reminder that the real story isn’t just the game — it’s the business, the jobs, the skills, the dollars and the future they represent.
Disclosure: The author is a a State of Play board member.
