- Hollow Knight: Silksong has been a huge Steam success on day one
- Demand for the game slowed the PC storefront to a crawl
- After a day, its peak concurrent player count sits at over half a million
Now that Hollow Knight: Silksong is out, it’s been impossible to contain the hype and demand for the long-awaited game.
As we mentioned in our Silksong live coverage blog, console and PC storefronts – including Steam, Nintendo eShop, and the PlayStation Store – could not bear the brunt of hundreds of thousands of players descending upon them like a plague of gaming locusts.
Steam was especially hit hard, with users running into a litany of issues. These included (but were not limited to) Silksong’s store page not loading, users being unable to add the game to cart, and multiple instances of the game being added to cart, likely as a result of furious clicking.
Now that the dust has settled, though, online database SteamDB has updated day one stats for Hollow Knight: Silksong. At time of writing, the game has reached a peak concurrent player count of 535,213.
Not only is that slightly more than the recent Battlefield 6 open beta (which reached a peak of 521,079 players), it’s also currently the 18th highest peak concurrent player count on record.
Furthermore, if you take out multiplayer-focused games like Counter-Strike 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Dota 2, Silksong appears to have the seventh-highest peak player count among single-player-focused games. In this regard, it’s only behind Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Banana (?), Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, and Black Myth: Wukong.
And that’s on Steam alone. I personally bought the game from GOG for a DRM-free version while Valve’s storefront buckled under the pressure. I also imagine Silksong has done similarly well on Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, especially thanks to its day-one Xbox Game Pass launch.
