Team Cherry’s metroidvania sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, took down multiple storefronts when it was released this Thursday. Nope, it’s not a new Battlefront or CoD, nor Witcher or some MMORPG, nor is it another clickbait-type announcement regarding how many players joined via a game streaming service; this is actually an example of too many folks trying to buy a game at the same time. As covered by VGC, Hollow Knight: Silksong managed, in a way, to break the internet for a time on Thursday after being launched.
“Shortly after Silksong – the most wishlisted title on Steam – went live, users reported being unable to access its game page on Steam, or purchase the title on Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch.”
-VGC
Silksong is hammering the Steam, Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation stores 😅 pic.twitter.com/PXueVGvAnR
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) September 4, 2025
It was reported that just 30 minutes after being released on Steam, there were already over 100,000 users playing the game, and since then, that number has peaked at well over half a million. This is actually quite an astounding feat, given that normally these types of numbers only show for online games like Dota 2 or PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS (which it briefly surpassed). It currently still sits at #4 on the Steam DB most played chart.
Some folks reported being able to purchase the $19.99 game via apps on their phones rather than attempting to use online storefronts. This, interestingly enough, seems to align with other past circumstances involving CPU/GPU shortages, where the same approach could sometimes yield better results. It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that the sequel had such a demand, given that the original has reportedly sold more than 15 million copies since being released in 2017. Meanwhile, Silksong was announced two years later, and updates for it have been scarce until recently. Well, it just goes to show that you don’t need super flashy, realistic graphics, or a AAA budget to make a game people are willing to buy on day one, and congrats to Team Cherry on a job well done.