Hollow Knight: Silksong may have crashed Steam, PSN, and the Switch eStore with its launch, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt its success any once they all crawled back online. Team Cherry’s enormously anticipated Metroidvania sequel has just reached over half a million concurrent players on Steam alone. That’s a figure that doesn’t include Xbox, PlayStation, or Switch numbers, nor indeed PC players who bought the game on GOG or elsewhere, or who are playing it via Game Pass. It’s fair to say things are going pretty well.
At around 10.30 ET this morning, September 4, Kotaku team members began dropping Silksong‘s concurrent player numbers as compiled by SteamDB into the Slack. 156,271 was the first big number to astonish us. The original Hollow Knight‘s all-time peak was 72,916, and even that was set only yesterday. On release in 2017, it was lucky to see just a thousand, its popularity building up to a big August 2018 spike of 10,000 concurrent players. It took until May 2022 to find 20,000, and only hit those numbers again last month after the announcement of the release date for the long-delayed sequel. I explain all this because it’s fairly important context when looking at the hundreds of thousands who have shown up for Silksong.
By 12.30 today, that number had reached 245,587, and it seemed like it might be time to write about hitting a quarter of a million. But the number kept going up. At 1 p.m. it was 382,195, and just six minutes later had risen to over 400,000. At 1.30, 478k, and then at 2 p.m. it reached a ridiculous 534,450. That makes it the game with the 18th highest number of concurrent players on Steam, ever. It just beat the hugely popular Battlefield 6 beta weekend into 19th. That, let’s not forget, was a free weekend with a multiplayer game—this is a 2D single-player platformer.
Of course, a large part of Silksong‘s launch day success is the extraordinary build-up and anticipation it’s received. Absent from industry showcases for years on end, its potential audience became almost cult-like as it endured the long stretch of silence. The original Hollow Knight was much more of a sleeper hit, slowly building its audience and reputation, hence lacking any headline spike at any point over the last eight years. It’ll be interesting to see how long Silksong can maintain this momentum, as people get over the sense of disbelief that it actually really exists and is finally here. The number has started dropping for the first time all day as I’ve written this, just by five thousand or so, but it suggests it’s calming down for the moment. Of course, this could start climbing again once the U.S. workforce that didn’t book the day off are released home to reach their computers and consoles.
In the meantime, it strongly suggests that Team Cherry were very wise to pick the price point that surprised so many. Yes, the game could absolutely have sold incredibly well at $60, based on reputation alone, but going for $20 vastly increases the potential audience who will pay right now, rather than waiting six months for a 90 percent off Steam sale. Given the half a million people simultaneously playing on Steam likely only represents a fraction of those who will have bought the game today, this will be a massive financial success. And we’re just talking about today’s sales.
Whether the game’s actually good or not? That, rather intriguingly, is something everyone’s finding out simultaneously today, given no review code was supplied to press. The lines who played a brief demo at Gamescom had an inkling, but it’ll be tomorrow before consensus begins to appear.
