Hollow Knight: Silksong was one the most anticipated games of the year, and it finally released yesterday. AFter years of anticipation, gamers could finally get their hands on Team Cherry’s latest. Well, they could have in theory. In actuality, the game was so insanely popular that it caused quite a ruckus on virtually every possible outlet to purchase the game, setting records and becoming a rather historic launch.
Hollow Knight: Silksong Sets Records, Crashes Steam and More
Not long after the official 10:00 am ET launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong, the Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, Steam, and Xbox Games Store all suffered major issues. Players couldn’t buy the game at all. In fact, in some instances, players couldn’t buy anything on the aforementioned platforms. The indie Metroidvania totally crashed the video game purchasing market.
This is partly due to the criticized decision not to allow pre-orders. Silksong existed in the liminal space between game announcement and game release for six years, and it was only recently that anyone knew the game was actually coming out. Then, just about two weeks before the September 4 launch, Team Cherry confirmed the release date for the first time. But they didn’t give anyone the chance to pre-order a copy, leading almost everyone to need to hit up those stores at the same exact time yesterday.
Humble Bundle, another digital storefront, even said at the time that they did not have any more copies of the game. That has since been remedied, but a digital store running out of copies of a game that fast is highly unusual. But in spite of all the struggle that everyone in the gaming world seemed to be experiencing, Silksong still managed to set records.
Over 100,000 were playing the game on Steam just a half hour after launch. Steam had effectively crashed, but there were still enough who broke through to hit that major milestone on just one of the four platforms the game was on. In terms of all-time peak concurrent player count, the sequel eclipsed the original Hollow Knight’s record on Steam with over 500,000 players in the first 24 hours. It didn’t take 24 hours, though. Silksong was supreme after just 15 minutes.
On Steam, which is, again, one of four platforms the game can be played on, Silksong is the most purchased game right now. That’s to be expected since it’s a day old. But it’s also the third-most played game overall, beating out titles like Apex Legends, Path of Exile 2, Rust, Stardew Valley, and Helldivers 2. It only trails Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2. Every single game in the top five is free to play except Silksong. It currently has 546,354 players actively on the game, which is the high for the day. Everyone is playing it.
The world knew that the indie title would be massive. You can’t make a sequel to one of the most beloved games of the century without expecting a ton of hype. Having it take six years to go from announced to available only added to that, as well as the complete and utter lack of information for most of that time. The hype grew to untenable levels, and we saw that in full force yesterday.
Conclusion
Hollow Knight: Silksong is easily one of the biggest games of the year, which is wildly impressive for an indie game. It’s up there with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Donkey Kong Bananza, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. But none of those games had quite the successful (or unsuccessful thanks to the crashes on stores) launch that this one did, possibly foretelling a great awards season.
