Video Games

No, you can’t play Hollow Knight: Silksong early

Beware of the newest email scam

Marco Wutz

No, you can’t play Hollow Knight: Silksong early
No, you can’t play Hollow Knight: Silksong early /

Yes, we’d love to play Hollow Knight: Silksong early. Would we be jealous if you got to play it before us? Perhaps a little bit. But if you’re getting an email offering you early access to the highly anticipated indie game, which will be on Xbox Game Pass in 2023, you still shouldn’t engage, because it’s a scam.

YouTuber John Wolfe took to Twitter (thanks, GamesRadar) to warn fellow creators of the phishing attempt. Someone posing as a part of Team Cherry, the developer of Hollow Knight: Silksong, contacted Wolfe via email to offer him early access to “their” upcoming title.

As is often the case with phishing attempts, the text didn’t actually address Wolfe himself. It saves the scammers a lot of time to just keep their mails as generic as possible, so they can send them out en masse. A quick look at Team Cherry’s website should also easily clear things up, because the person apparently working there is not listed as a team member. If you’re ever unsure, you can also check social media for further confirmation.

Also, Team Cherry is an indie studio. They don’t have an advertising department. Most devs have publishers or hire PR firms to handle things like influencer relations, so getting contacted directly should always make you at least a little bit suspicious. Typos and various other mistakes are another sure giveaway that something is wrong.

Wolfe goes a bit more into detail on Twitter, so if you need some further tutoring on scam prevention, that’s a good place to start.

Hollow Knight: Silksong releases at some point in 2023 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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