Hollow Knight: Silksong fears were wrong, and September game sales prove it

The fear that Hollow Knight: Silksong would be so amazing that players would ignore every other game release in September was not justified. Many developers, independent ones in particular, postponed launching their titles to avoid clashing with Silksong, which we now see was unnecessary.

Looking at Steam sales in September so far, Silksong was #1 in global revenue during the week of Sept. 2, the time of its release. Despite an astronomical count of over 500,000 concurrent players on Silksong two days after, the game slowly dropped in the sales charts in the following weeks. It was #4 on the week of Sept. 9, losing to Borderlands 4. For the week of Sept. 16, it dropped to #14, getting surpassed by Dying Light: The Beast, Silent Hill f, and the indie game Jump Space.

In the last 24 hours, other games released recently have also sold more than Silksong, such as Hades 2, Clover Pit, and Megabonk. While Steam is not the only digital distribution platform out there, it stands to reason that its stats would match those of others.

Silksong’s player count three weeks later also shows it’s a normal game with a normal player trajectory, albeit on a much larger scale than usual. While it used to peak at over 400,000 concurrent players days after its release, it now peaks below 200,000. This common trend was felt by other era-defining games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring, which show once again that Silksong is not being more disruptive than other massive games that were released before it.

These numbers don’t mean Silksong was a failure at all. It’s still in the top 30 games in revenue on Steam three weeks after it released. According to Steam Charts, Silksong is the fifth most-played game on the platform today with a peak of 180,000 concurrent players, a number higher than live service games with aggressive gameplay loops like Apex Legends, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Path of Exile 2.

But Silksong’s sales numbers show how much we, as an industry, are driven by hype. This is expected and actually fun to be part of when you’re a player, but delaying games and thinking that a single release can change indie games’ pricing forever, all that before the title is released, opens the door for an industry to be manipulated by the handful of people who hold the hype at any point.

Fortunately, Silksong developer Team Cherry ignored all that and quietly released their game as planned, without actively disrupting anyone. But now, I wonder how the industry will overreact—and it will—as we approach May 26 next year when the explosive release date of GTA 6 is set to happen.

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