It’s no secret Demonschool is one of hottest upcoming indie releases of late 2025, but we’re having to face a longer wait because of Hollow Knight: Silksong taking the gaming world by storm with a surprise launch last month. Now, Necrosoft Games creative director Brandon Sheffield has elaborated on what the last-minute delay entailed and whether it was the right call.
If you missed the original news, Demonschool was meant to release on September 3 before being moved to November 19. When Silksong came out of the shadows and only gave everyone a couple of weeks to plan what to do, many indies understandably chose to ran away. “We basically had a conversation between the publisher (Ysbryd Games) and I deciding if we were to delay… I was on the side of staying, and the publisher was on the side of delaying. Ultimately, I think they were right,” Sheffield revealed during a chat with Aftermath.
Demonschool packs a strong visual style with Persona, Shin Megami Tensei, and horror cinema DNA. That, coupled with a notable social element (including 15 characters to develop relationships with) plus a very familiar but fast-paced and combo-based tactical strategy/RPG combat system, instantly made it super appealing as soon as it was unveiled. But anyone who’s familiar with the indie scene knows it’s terribly hard to break through the noise nowadays.
Sheffield admitted it’s rough out there even if you make a huge initial impression: “If you really want to make a mark and actually get your money back, you have to at least have the chance of being the ‘Indie Game of the Week’, and if you can’t make that happen, then you have a 0% chance of it. And there was a 0% chance that was going to happen for us with Silksong” It wouldn’t have been the first time a promising new indie release got buried by something far larger, only to become a cult classic that’s discovered by the mainstream crowd months (if not years) later.
“If you’re a live-service game, you have multiple chances to possibly turn things around, but if you’re a single-player game, it’s one and done. Your launch is very big, and if you don’t succeed right away, the likelihood of getting picked up later is so slim,” he added. With the month of November looking busy (but not impossible), it’s safe to say Demonschool has positioned itself as one of the launches to watch out for, so let’s hope it can find an audience big enough, as it’ll need to sell “100,000 copies to break even.”
The entire conversation is worth a listen, and if you want the abridged version you can read, GamesIndustry.biz has you covered. Sheffield also went on to discuss all the current funding challenges ambitious indie studios are facing and how hard getting years of hard work in front of people has become.
Demonschool is finally launching on November 19, 2025, on PC, macOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PS4/5, and Xbox consoles.
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