Hollow Knight: Silksong is coming out in less than two weeks, and you know what that means, right? Yup, that means it’s time to play (or replay) the original Hollow Knight! Which is exactly what a lot of folks are doing.
Hollow Knight, released on PC in 2017, has reached an all-time high concurrent player count today on Steam (per SteamDB), eight years after release, almost certainly due to the Silksong news. At the time this piece is being written, it’s sitting at 23,840 concurrent players, an all-time peak.
Prior to this, concurrent player counts have been sitting roughly around 10,000 for months on end, usually a bit below. But after the Silksong news yesterday, they began climbing, reaching 16k yesterday afternoon and dipping slightly overnight before shooting up again today in a playercount that seems poised to climb even higher throughout the day and into the weekend. The previous all-time high was over 20k players in 2022.
This is likely due to a surge of players running to replay Hollow Knight, or play it for the first time, ahead of the release of Silksong on September 4. There has been no shortage of interest in Team Cherry’s standout Metroidvania in the years since its launch, as we now know it’s sold 15 million copies across all platforms.
The sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, looks to be even bigger than the base game of Hollow Knight if the trailer shown yesterday is any indication, and it sounds like there’s even more Silksong to come after launch. We got to play a little bit of Silksong at gamescom this past week, with our previewer saying it “shows little sign of disappointing.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
