Silksong is upon us – at least 111,873 of us. The launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong has brought various gaming storefronts to their knees as legions of Silkposters emerge from their caves to actually play the long-awaited Metroidvania.
With the caveat that Silksong launched midday in the midst of the work week, SteamDB shows a peak concurrent player count of 111,873 just hours after launch. That appears to be the peak for now, and while most indies would love to achieve that kind of day-one figure, it's still well short of any major Steam records, and puts Silksong as the 166th biggest concurrent player number in Steam history. We'll see how the number evolves as the day rolls on, though.
That figure certainly beats the original Hollow Knight's peak concurrent player count record of 72,916, which was set just yesterday in the leadup to Silksong. It might seem odd to think that a megapopular indie hit like Hollow Knight never even cracked 100,000 concurrent players, but remember, it was a quiet launch that slowly drew in fans over time, so they weren't all playing at once. That, of course, is an illustration of the flaws of relying on concurrent player numbers as the ultimate measure of a game's success – but hey, it's Silksong day, everybody wants to see the number go up.
Those numbers, of course, only account for players on PC. We don't know how many Silksongers are playing on Switch, PlayStation, or Xbox, but given the issues seemingly every digital storefront suffered in the minutes after the game's launch, I'd suspect that there are quite a few.
With no leaks or review codes out for Silksong ahead of launch, we're all in the same boat as more and more players get into the game. If you're not able to play for yourself just yet, keep an eye on our Hollow Knight Silksong release live coverage for all the day-zero news.
Over 12,300 people turned up to watch "John Silksong" release one last Hollow Knight: Silksong news update, and it was kind of a beautiful moment: "All of this truly has been my, no, our daily Silksong news."
