The incredible momentum of Hollow Knight: Silksong

Let's take a second to appreciate just how dominant Hollow Knight: Silksong has been today.

Team Cherry's long-awaited sequel reached a peak of over half-a-million concurrent players on Steam. While there's no data for consoles just yet, it's probably doing just as well on PlayStation 5, Switch 1 and 2, and Xbox Series X/S. And that's in spite of how the game crashed nearly every major digital storefront at 7:00am PT when a horde of people rushed to buy it.

All that for an indie metroidvania game. That doesn't happen very often!

Unless it's Grand Theft Auto, most triple-A games don't get this kind of attention, either. I'm sure there are some lessons the gaming industry will try to take away from this moment, but the developer's situation is so unique that I think it'd be impossible to replicate.

The unexpected success of the first Hollow Knight is what gave this small Australian team so much goodwill and capital in the first place. To the point that (as revealed in a Bloomberg interview a few weeks ago) Team Cherry was able to stretch their money and work on Silksong at their own pace—hence all the delays. They even joked that they could've kept working on it longer if they wanted to!

Most studios, whether indie or not, can't afford a nearly decade-long dev cycle like that. And as a side effect of this approach, the fanbase became starved for information, gobbling up any little update they could find due to the absence of any form of traditional marketing.

The mythology of Silksong (as well as sales of the first Hollow Knight) only grew more fervently over the years, leading to the pent-up demand we saw today. Judging by these early sales numbers, it's very likely that Team Cherry will continue having the luxury of working on what they want, when they want—and for now, that seems like it'll be more Silksong content.