Silksong’s Half-Million Steam Peak Proves the Wait
Hollow Knight: Silksong hit 587,150 peak concurrent Steam players, becoming a record-breaking indie sequel and a launch-day phenomenon.
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