How Many People Are Playing Hollow Knight: Silksong?

Last updated on December 21st, 2025 at 07:21 am

OK, so full disclosure: when Hollow Knight: Silksong finally got its long-awaited reveal, I wasn’t just excited for the game itself. I was legitimately wondering at that point how many other people were freaking out about it. The player count, as it turned out, was completely bonkers. Allow me to guide you through what really happened.

The Day They Broke the Internet

So here’s some of what I dug up while poring through the stats in its first four hours, more than 500k players joined the game to play simultaniously on day one! That’s not a typo. 500k People Playing at Once.

This made the game the 18th highest launch peak on Steam of all time, which frankly was kind of mind-blowing. But it didn’t stop there. By around three hours after release, the game had briefly elevated to 535,213 concurrent players large enough that it actually crashed digital storefronts. Dude, players couldn’t even buy the game due to demand volume (too many people wanting it all at once).

Two days after launch, Silksong peaked at 587,000 concurrent players before a new record was set two hours later. That leap to 17th best of all time on Steam? It’s the sort of number that drives game studios mad.

The Real Box Office: Who’s Actually Watching What Right Now

Here’s the thing we forget whenever a game launches the long-term player retention can be just as telling as those initial numbers. I took a look at SteamCharts and as of mid-October 2025, silksong is maintaining roughly around 37,787 players concurrent on an average day. Six-hour-a-day average.

That’s not huge compared to the launch madness, but it is healthy. Really healthy, actually. For comparison, the majority of indie games experience a very steep decline after that first week. Silksong is holding steady, which indicates to me that investing in larger numbers isn’t only a novelty from initial launch people are really staying.

Upon hitting somewhere in the region of 424,912 current players across overall most-played rankings, the game settled on position 30th. Any solid position months out, when you’re talking about Steam games (which number in the thousands) is good!

Why People Cared Before the Movie Ever Even Got Made

A note before Hollow Knight: Silksong actual launch, 5.2 million entries existed on the wish list of the side-scrolling kingdom adventure game that’s successful financially and critically. Yeah, 5.2 million. I have never seen numbers like that for an indie game. That type of prerelease momentum is the stuff most studios only wish about.

And here’s the thing those wishlists actually converted into sales. The first three days the game already logged about 3.2 million Steam sales And that’s not just wishlist conversion that’s a real fucking conversion rate most games would kill for. The wishlist-to-sale ratio further proved that all of that anticipation was more than just noise.

The Multi-Platform Spread

One thing I didn’t expect? Silksong isn’t limited to Steam, however. The game landed on Game Pass with about 1 million players logging on day one, and combined across PlayStation and Switch, it’s sold some 2.7 million copies. Because that 587,000 concurrent peak I mentioned? That’s just Steam. The actual combined player base number is much higher across all platforms.

It’s interesting, because it just proves to you how little sense game genres make now. You can’t just check Steam numbers alone and think that you’re getting everything.

Community Mods Are Shaking Things Up

And this is where it gets super neato the community didn’t sit around and wait for Team Cherry to release patches. But fans began churning out difficulty mods, quality-of-life improvements and all manner of imaginative changes fairly soon after the game’s release. What I witnessed ran the gamut from tweaks benefiting speedrunners to more newbie-friendly quality of life changes.

And Team Cherry was also quick on the draw. They deployed patches to address Simplified Chinese translation issues, indicating they were listening to feedback from key markets. That’s a level of responsiveness that keeps communities engaged.

How You Can Actually Follow These Numbers Yourself

If you’re interested in going down further into the data rabbit hole (as in: actually interested in what various player metrics and trends mean), there are good free tools to use. You can use SteamCharts and SteamDB for real-time player peaks, history and tracking of wishlists. The Steam Web API also permits you to retrieve raw data, if you’re into that sort of thing.

For anyone creating content related to games, or just having a field day obsessing over gaming analytics, these aren’t hidden assets they’re out in the open, and even surprisingly detailed.

What This All Means

So back to the original question: how many people are playing Hollow Knight: Silksong? The answer’s complicated but cool. You have almost 40,000 people a day playing it, millions of copies sold cross platform and a vibrant community creating content and playing the game daily for months after its release.

The headline-launch peak of 587,000 was impressive but an even more revealing stat is that the game didn’t plumb new depths after the week two of Super League. It reached its audience and held it. For an indie game, that’s the real victory not the impressive peak numbers but the longevity.

If you’re a gamer, this game is worth your time. If you are a developer, swingy numbers like these demonstrate what real hype and solid game design can do. And even if you’re just someone who appreciates grokking how player tastes and gaming culture are changing? The launch and ongoing status of Silksong is an exact textbook example of how modern gaming communities truly operate.

Read:

Hollow Knight Silksong Community & Stats Phenomenon