Silksong Has A Huge Start On Steam, Rockets To No. 1 On Switch 2 eShop

Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally available, and it’s putting up huge numbers on Steam. The game blasted off today with 5,000 concurrent players in the first five minutes, growing to 50,000 within 30 minutes and 100,000 after the first 45 minutes of availability. It’s now exceeded 478,000 concurrent players.

Silksong is currently the No. 3 most-played game on Steam right now. The game is putting up these massive figures despite numerous and serious issues on Steam that are preventing people from accessing the store, let alone buying and playing the game.

The 2017 original Hollow Knight, meanwhile, capped out at a peak concurrent-player record of 72,916–a record that was, in fact, achieved just recently on September 3. The game’s player numbers no doubt spiked due to interest in the sequel.

Silksong’s Steam numbers are expected to keep climbing. Historical data shows that Steam games tend to spike on weekends in terms of popularity when people generally have more free time.

Silksong is also available for console, but the same kind of player data is not available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, or Switch 2. However, it’s been reported that Silksong is currently No. 1 on the Switch 2 eShop.

On Xbox and PC, the game is also available via Game Pass, so any sales data for those platforms wouldn’t necessarily tell the whole story. For what it’s worth, Silksong’s rollout on console platforms also ran into a number of issues.

The original Hollow Knight sold more than 15 million copies.

In other Silksong news, the game has Twitch Drops available for a Hornet badge. Hornet is the playable character in Team Cherry’s long-awaited sequel.

Silksong took years to come out, but it wasn’t because the game was stuck in development hell or anything like that, the developers said. Simply put, the enormous success of the first game gave the small team the time to develop the sequel at their own pace. Also adding to the lengthy development schedule was how Silksong actually began as an expansion to Hollow Knight before shifting to a standalone release.