Hollow Knight: Silksong crashed multiple gaming platforms’ servers on launch. What did fans think of the long-anticipated title?
by Drake Hill
Social Media Manager
On the 4th of September, the developers behind Hollow Knight, Team Cherry, released one of the most anticipated sequels of 2025, Hollow Knight Silksong, on Steam. Hollow Knight is a metroidvania action platformer released in 2017 and was very well-received, becoming a meteoric hit. It was considered one of the best indie games of all time, getting several “Best Of” awards. Even after its initial launch, Hollow Knight would continue to gain popularity over the years, selling over 15 million copies and building a large fanbase.
Eventually, Team Cherry started to work on a potential expansion to Hollow Knight in 2019, announcing the DLC to focus on a new playable character, Hornet. However, due to its growing size, it became too large to remain as DLC, evolving into its own full-fledged game. After that, Team Cherry was relatively quiet on the development of the game, with rare instances of mentions during showcases and glimpses of demos at Gamescom. Due to this, there was rising anticipation from fans, which ultimately led to the surprise reveal on August 21, 2025, of the release date of Hollow Knight: Silksong. According to a Hollow Knight fan, Jack Wade, “I immediately sent my friend the trailer when I saw it, and we proceeded to scream at each other for 30 minutes on call.”
The reveal caught most Hollow Knight fans off guard, as it would release on the 4th of September. Despite the unexpectedly soon release of the game, many people were prepared for any price Team Cherry would put the game up for. Jack stated, “I checked every day for 2 weeks to see if I could pre-order, there was no such pre-order and I wasted my time but it was worth.” On September 1st, the price of Silksong was confirmed to be only 20 dollars, only 5 dollars more than the previous title. On release day, Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all experienced slowdowns or even server crashes due to the extremely high amount of demand for the game. Within 72 hours, Hollow Knight: Silksong sold over 3 million copies, breaking the record for the biggest indie game launch of all time. Currently, Silksong has over 500,000 concurrent players on Steam and over 1 million on Xbox thanks to Game Pass. To those looking for a difficult Metroidvania action platformer, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a well-made and affordable experience for any gamer.
