It remains a little strange to say that Hollow Knight: Silksong is real. For seven years, players were teased by Silkposts, fake reveals, and community rituals built around a sequel that often felt more like a shared joke than an actual game. Yet the joke has become a phenomenon. When Team Cherry finally opened the gates, the response was not a polite queue but a stampede. Steam, the Nintendo eShop, and the PlayStation Store all buckled under the weight of players trying to buy the game at once. How often does a long-delayed indie sequel turn its launch day into a stress test for three major storefronts? The answer, in this case, is once in a generation.
Now that the dust has settled, the numbers tell a clearer story. Silksong reached an all-time peak of 587,150 concurrent players on Steam over its launch weekend in 2025. That figure makes it the second-highest peak ever achieved by an indie game on the platform, and it places the sequel comfortably inside Steam's top 20 most-played games of all time. The list around it is not made up of small cult favourites. Silksong edges out Valheim, Call of Duty, Terraria, Fallout 4, Schedule 1, Helldivers 2, and Among Us. For a game from a small studio, in a genre often treated as niche, that is a remarkable sentence to write.
A Half-Million Pilgrims at the Gate
The scale of the launch becomes even clearer when the leaderboard is laid out. Silksong's 587,000 peak sits at number 17 on Steam's all-time concurrent-player chart, ahead of Path of Exile 2, the Battlefield 6 open beta, and Valheim. It is below giants such as Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld, Counter-Strike 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, Lost Ark, Dota 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Elden Ring. Yet the company it keeps is the point. A hand-drawn metroidvania sequel, built by a tiny team and powered by years of community folklore, now shares a statistical table with some of the biggest blockbusters in PC gaming.
| Rank |
Game |
Peak concurrent players |
| 2 |
Black Myth: Wukong |
2.4 million |
| 3 |
Palworld |
2.1 million |
| 4 |
Counter-Strike 2 |
1.8 million |
| 5 |
Monster Hunter Wilds |
1.3 million |
| 6 |
Lost Ark |
1.3 million |
| 7 |
Dota 2 |
1.2 million |
| 8 |
Cyberpunk 2077 |
1.05 million |
| 9 |
Elden Ring |
950,000 |
| 10 |
Banana |
917,000 |
| 11 |
New World: Aeternum |
913,000 |
| 12 |
Hogwarts Legacy |
879,000 |
| 13 |
Baldur's Gate 3 |
875,000 |
| 14 |
Goose Goose Duck |
702,000 |
| 15 |
Marvel Rivals |
644,000 |
| 16 |
Apex Legends |
624,000 |
| 17 |
Hollow Knight: Silksong |
587,150 |
| 18 |
Path of Exile 2 |
578,000 |
| 19 |
Battlefield 6 Open Beta |
521,000 |
| 20 |
Valheim |
502,000 |
What does a half-million peak actually mean? It means that, for a brief window, Silksong was not merely a successful sequel but a cultural event. It means that years of pent-up frustration were converted into a single, concentrated burst of buying, downloading, and playing. It also means that Team Cherry's decision to remain quiet for so long did not alienate the audience; if anything, the silence became part of the myth. The game arrived with a built-in audience so hungry that storefront outages became part of the launch story rather than a disaster.
⚠️ A Very Positive, Not Overwhelmingly Positive, Reception
The launch was not flawless. Silksong's reviews have settled at 'Very Positive' rather than the 'Overwhelmingly Positive' rating earned by its predecessor. The complaints are specific: a widely criticised Chinese localisation, described by some players as rubbish, and a sharp difficulty spike that has frustrated part of the audience. For a sequel with this much anticipation, any friction becomes a talking point. Does a rougher localisation or a punishing difficulty curve seriously damage a game's legacy? In this case, the evidence suggests not. The controversies have done little to dent Silksong's momentum, and the concurrent-player peak remains the headline.
By 2026, the conversation has shifted. The question is no longer whether Silksong would ever arrive, or whether the long wait would be rewarded. The question is what its launch says about the modern indie landscape. A small studio can now compete for attention with the largest publishers on Steam, at least for a weekend. Community lore, memes, and years of speculation can build an audience that rivals traditional marketing. And a game can launch with technical and localisation issues, absorb criticism, and still be remembered as one of the biggest hits of its release year.
️ A Benchmark for the Years Ahead
The strangest part may be how normal it all feels now. Silksong is real. It is playable. It has a Steam peak of more than half a million players and a place in the platform's all-time top 20. The memes have not disappeared, but they have changed from jokes about absence into jokes about abundance. Players who once posted Silkposts to pass the time now argue about difficulty, localisation, and route optimisation. The pilgrimage is over, and the citadel is crowded.
For Team Cherry, the result is a runaway success with a few snags in the road. For players, it is a reminder that patience can be rewarded, even if the reward arrives with a few sharp edges. And for the industry, it is a data point that will be cited for years: a delayed indie sequel, powered by one of the most persistent communities in gaming, turned its launch into one of the biggest moments in Steam history. Who could have predicted that the punchline to seven years of Silkposts would be a half-million-player stampede? Perhaps the most dedicated Skongers could. After all, they were the ones who kept the gates crowded before the gates even opened.
For anyone who has been watching from the sidelines, the end of the long wait raises a more practical question: whether to jump into Silksong now or wait for a discount. With so many storefronts and regional pricing quirks, it helps to have a straightforward way to compare offers before committing. Sites like DealNest make that step easier, giving players a place to check game prices without digging through multiple store pages.
That matters in an indie landscape where attention is scarce and budgets are real. A launch as huge as Silksong can push older metroidvanias and similar games into the spotlight too, and savvy players often use the moment to plan what to play next. Whether you're buying Silksong itself or browsing for something to fill the post-credits gap, DealNest offers a useful starting point for comparing costs and spotting deals.
