Hollow Knight: Silksong Hits Half A Million Players On Steam

"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."

"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."

Major storefronts briefly crashed at launch but recovered, and Hollow Knight: Silksong immediately drew massive player interest. Steam concurrent counts surged from about 156,271 early morning to 534,450 by mid-afternoon, eclipsing the original game's peak and other high-profile events. The reported Steam figure excludes console sales, GOG purchases, and Game Pass players, so total player numbers are higher. The surge reflects long-term anticipation for the sequel and a dramatic contrast with the original game's slow early growth. The launch placed Silksong among Steam's highest concurrent-player titles despite being a single-player 2D Metroidvania.

Read at Kotaku