Hollow Knight: Silksong Gets off to a Strong Start, as Expected

Yesterday's release of Hollow Knight: Silksong was a highly anticipated success. Developed by Team Cherry in Australia, the game pushed digital distribution platforms to their limits at launch.

Shortly after the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong went on sale, Steam's servers became overloaded. The same happened with Nintendo's eShop. Keys were temporarily sold out in the Humble Store. The game was unavailable on the PlayStation Store for a while - and a similar situation occurred on the Xbox Store, particularly since the game is also included as a Day One title in Game Pass. However, after a while, the rush subsided and more and more people were able to play the game, which costs just under €20.

According to Alinea Analytics, its predecessor, Hollow Knight (2017), had sold over 15 million copies across platforms. After a long development period, Hollow Knight: Silksong has become one of the most highly anticipated titles on Steam, with over 5 million wishlists ahead of its release. Over 70% of these players had also played the first game. With a peak of 535,213 concurrent users on launch day, it ranks 18th among the most-played games on Steam in terms of peak concurrent users. Excluding free-to-play titles, it ranks 10th. Only one other game has had a higher CCU peak this year: Monster Hunter Wilds (1,384,608) from Capcom. Incidentally, the high expectations are also reflected in the fact that Hollow Knight reached its CCU peak of 72,916 on Steam the day before the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Prior to this, the previous peak was "just" 20,324 in May 2022.

"On Steam alone, it hit 500K+ concurrent users at launch, putting it straight into the Top 10 premium CCU hall-of-fame, with numbers expected to climb further over the weekend. For context, the median title in this league has sold 15M+ copies and grossed over $480M on Steam alone," said Alinea Analytics. Added to this are the results from the PlayStation, Switch and Xbox platforms. It is likely that user numbers will rise further still this coming weekend, which makes the postponement of some game releases to avoid this surge entirely understandable.

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