Hollow Knight: Silksong Breaks the Internet after its premiere and breaks sales records
In less than 30 minutes after its release, Hollow Knight: Silksong reached more than 100,000 concurrent players on Steam
Hollow Knight: Silksong has been, without a doubt, one of the most chaotic —and at the same time, shocking— video game launches of the recent era. Just minutes after the highly anticipated indie title became available, the servers of Xbox, Sony, Steam, and even Nintendo crashed due to the massive avalanche of players wanting to play it.
What seemed like a quiet sequel to a cult game instantly became a global phenomenon, shattering sales records and the number of users connected simultaneously.
Silksong: When "Indie" Means Monstrous
Few people imagined that Silksong, developed by the small Australian studio Team Cherry, would achieve what we normally associate with AAA blockbuster releases: breaking the infrastructure of giants like Steam and PlayStation simply by the number of people trying to play it. For context, minutes after its worldwide release, the Steam store, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo eShop all presented errors, prevented new purchases, or simply did not load the game pages. Users around the world flooded social media with complaints and memes documenting the global outage.
Many reported that they couldn't even add the game to their shopping cart; others complained because there were no pre-orders, which further saturated the infrastructure. According to the BBC, the problems on Steam lasted more than two hours, and sites like Downdetector recorded thousands of reports per minute. There were even jokes that Silksong not only "crashed the internet," but that its arrival was so disruptive that not even gaming titans were prepared.
Sales and player records: figures for the history books
Silksong's brutal impact also translates into historic statistics. In less than 30 minutes after its launch, it reached 100,000 simultaneous players on Steam alone, a figure that soon multiplied, reaching over 535,000 connected users at a peak that same week. Some reports indicate that the record could even reach 600,000.considering the increases over the weekend.
In terms of sales, there are no official finalized figures yet, but all indicators point to impressive numbers. The game remained at number one among the top sellers on Steam and Nintendo eShop during the first few days, only being surpassed on PlayStation by one of the best-selling titles of the season. Furthermore, a good portion of the copies played on Xbox come from Game Pass, which adds even more active users simultaneously and makes the count conservative.
Although the studio has not published exact sales figures for Silksong at the time of this note, experts agree that we are talking about millions of copies in its first week, considering that its predecessor sold more than 15 million since 2017. The hype was such that before its launch, the game had almost 5 million wishlists on Steam, surpassing any other indie game on the platform.
An indie game that changed the rules and the market
The most surprising thing is how Silksong has established itself as one of the most successful independent games of recent years, and even in history. What started as a DLC and ended up becoming a massive expansion, is now a benchmark of what is possible when a community supports a development and expectations are generated not only by marketing, but by the quality and passion of the studio.
It is not only a commercial triumph, but also a design one. On a technical level, Silksong offers a much larger world, more intense combats, and a central character—Hornet—with fresh mechanics. All of this, at a substantially lower price than AAA releases and with the artisanal touch of Team Cherry. It is no wonder that media such as The New York Times or BBC already catalog it as a cultural milestone and mass phenomenon, placing Silksong on the same level as other indie hits like Undertale or Stardew Valley.
Hollow Knight: Silksong has rewritten the industry's history books, proving that the indie phenomenon can be as, or more, impactful than any other major production. And if the current numbers are a trend, this is just the beginning of the legend.
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