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Silksong already has the 18th highest all-time peak player count in Steam history as it draws over 500,000 concurrent players in its first 4 hours

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Hollow Knight: Silksong

Silksong has sold more than 3.2 million copies on Steam in less than 2 weeks, industry analyst firm estimates

Lincoln Carpenter

15 September 2025

A shaw-inspiring success.

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(Image credit: Team Cherry)

September might be packed with game releases, but Silksong set an early watermark for the month by clearing out the release calendar of competitors, claiming a place in all-time peak player count rankings, and—lest we forget—setting Steam entirely on fire. As the dust settles, we’re now getting our first estimates for just how many copies Silksong has sold.

In its game discovery newsletter, games industry analyst firm GameDiscoverCo estimates based on available data that Hollow Knight: Silksong has already sold more than 3.2 million copies on Steam. Additionally, GameDiscoverCo reckons it’s been downloaded approximately 1.5 million times through Xbox Game Pass, though it’s unclear how many of those downloads were distributed between console and PC.
For an indie release from a relatively small production team, that’s a phenomenal success, particularly when compared with other Metroidvanias. Silksong’s in a genre with no shortage of enthusiasts, but Metroidvanias aren’t what we’d typically consider as having mass market appeal.

Related Articles

Silksong already has the 18th highest all-time peak player count in Steam history as it draws over 500,000 concurrent players in its first 4 hours

Everyone’s heading back to Hollow Knight for one last go before Silksong comes out—the game’s all-time Steam peak is rising as I write this headline

Hollow Knight: Silksong live launch coverage: It’s finally here

Comparing Steam sales numbers against other games released this year with the Metroidvania tag, GamesDiscoverCo says “Silksong’s dominance is striking.” Using GamesDiscoverCo’s numbers, Silksong has sold more than 69 times as many copies on Steam as the next-best performing game, Sega’s Shinobi: Art of Vengeance.

While the six years of Silksong’s harrowing hype cycle no doubt had some effect on its launch day interest, it seems like the strongest factor in its favor was—unsurprisingly—the reputation of the first Hollow Knight. “The overlap with OG Hollow Knight players is a whopping 79%,” GameDiscoverCo says. In other words, almost four out of five Silksong players have played or owned Hollow Knight, which has sold more than 11.4 million copies on Steam to date.
“This means that 22% of all Hollow Knight Steam players have already bought the sequel,” GameDiscoverCo says. In terms of franchise loyalty, Hollow Knight is bringing almost as many repeat customers as Elden Ring Nightreign, which had an 81% overlap with the original Elden Ring.
As impressive as Silksong’s early performance has been, GameDiscoverCo says it’s a phenomenon that isn’t a particularly useful point of comparison for other game launches.

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“Our biggest takeaway? Think of Silkson’s success more as a ‘rabid 20-30 million person fanbase gets to enjoy a long-awaited sequel’ than a success that can be analyzed in context with most new releases,” GameDiscoverCo says.

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Lincoln Carpenter

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News Writer

Lincoln has been writing about games for 11 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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Silksong already has the 18th highest all-time peak player count in Steam history as it draws over 500,000 concurrent players in its first 4 hours

Everyone’s heading back to Hollow Knight for one last go before Silksong comes out—the game’s all-time Steam peak is rising as I write this headline

Hollow Knight: Silksong live launch coverage: It’s finally here

Silksong finally has a release date, officially, from Team Cherry and everything—putting an end to over half a decade of Silksanity

The Silksong subreddit spent launch day sharing boss strats for Steam’s ‘cart phase’, banishing each other to the Skongless year of 2019, and—let’s see—posting hole

Silksong is so popular, even people in the Piracy subreddit are encouraging others to just buy it: ‘If we can afford to support them, we should’

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