I have reason to believe Silksong’s launch will be close to the top five of all time in Steam peak players. I’m not saying this just because of sheer wishlist estimates, but because of past releases of the same scale that fell between the one and two million concurrents range.
You could argue that the most obvious way to estimate Silksong player numbers on launch day, Sept. 4, is to look at wishlist numbers. However, Steam doesn’t reveal wishlist counts, just followers. You could trust third-party websites that estimate Silksong is close to 5 million wishlists, but even if that’s close to reality, it doesn’t mean everyone who’s wishlisted the game will buy and play it as soon as possible. That’s why I believe it’s easier to look at other games that were just as hyped as Silksong and how they performed after release. All numbers in this story are based on SteamDB’s peak charts.
Looking at followers alone, we could argue Silksong’s peak will be between 700,000 and 1 million players. That’s the all-time high of other highly anticipated single-player titles with similar followers, like Cyberpunk 2077 (1 million), Elden Ring (953,000), and Baldur’s Gate 3 (875,000).
However, Silksong will cost $19.99, significantly less than the price range of all these other games, which range between $39.99 and $59.99. So, I believe Silksong has better potential to convert wishlists into early purchases because of price alone. If that happens, I’m sure Silksong will easily break past 1 million concurrent players.
Any game’s peak audience, including Silksong’s, is partly influenced by the country where most of its player base lives. While Steam Charts and SteamDB don’t show player counts per region, we can estimate by how many reviews a game has in each language. The more Chinese reviews a game has, for example, the more players from China it should have.
Two of the three games that broke the 2 million all-time Steam players have a high number of Chinese reviews: PUBG and Black Myth: Wukong. Hollow Knight’s Chinese to English review ratio is closer to that of Palworld, the third game that broke the 2 million barrier. Assuming the audience of Silksong will be roughly the same as Hollow Knight’s, and considering that Silksong will be on Game Pass on launch day just like Palworld, I believe Silksong has the potential to get close to 2 million concurrent players.
But unlike Palworld, Silksong is exclusively a single-player game. We won’t see friends inviting each other like we saw in Palworld. Multiplayer helps boost the number of concurrent players, so Silksong not having it could result in fewer concurrent players than Palworld.
All the games I’ve mentioned are on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, just like Silksong will be. But Silksong is the only one on the list that will also be on the Nintendo Switch, a console that is already the perfect fit for Hollow Knight. It’s reasonable to expect people who played Hollow Knight on the Switch will also play Silksong there, making it one more console for Silksong’s playerbase to dilute into and reduce its Steam peak.
Silksong’s price and wishlist estimates are why I think it will have more than 1 million concurrent Steam players. The regions where Silksong is popular, the fact that it’s a single-player game, and its release on all big platforms aside from PC are why I think it won’t get past 2 million.
My guess is that Silksong will probably have its all-time peak between Sept. 5 and 7, the weekend of its release. That’s when people who started the game early on Sept. 4 will still be playing, while those who were too busy will use the weekend to kick things off.
All these estimates are just speculation, of course, because I’m an analytics nerd and it’s fun. In the end, as long as you believe you’ll have fun with Silksong, you should get the game and play it whenever you want, regardless of how many people are doing the same.
