Silksong launch causing problems for Steam and the Nintendo eShop

Yes, Hollow Knight: Silksong has had an absolutely massive launch. The release of this highly anticipated indie game was popular enough to cause issues for popular digital gaming storefronts like Steam and the Nintendo eShop.

Those who tried to buy Hollow Knight: Silksong right when it launched at 10 a.m. ET Thursday morning quickly ran into issues when it came to actually buying the game. And if early Steam player count numbers are any indication, that’s because a lot of people were trying to buy the game.

How did Hollow Knight: Silksong’s launch impact Steam and the Nintendo eShop?

It was temporarily difficult to even buy the game

Hollow Knight: Silksong hit a peak concurrent player count of 111,873 on Steam alone within an hour of its release. That SteamDB data is our first real indication of just how popular the game is. Maybe developers were wise to delay their games because of this release after all.

That’s doubly true because the process of actually downloading the game was also a hassle right at release. As posts on websites like Reddit show, Steam and the Nintendo eShop were struggling to load in the hour after Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release.

When the storefront itself won’t load, that makes it nearly impossible to buy this new game, let alone anything else launching this week. It simply seems that hundreds of thousands of people were trying to buy the game at the same time (it wasn’t possible to pre-order), and these storefronts couldn’t handle the demand. That should remove any and all doubt that Hollow Knight: Silksong will be a hit.

I experienced these issues for myself. I first went to purchase Hollow Knight: Silksong on the eShop on my Nintendo Switch 2. While the storefront did boot up, when I tried to go to the game’s store page, it wouldn’t load. After that, I went to Steam, only to find that its pages were struggling to load as well.

I then turned on my Xbox Series X, knowing that Hollow Knight: Silksong was a Game Pass title. It unfortunately did not show up when I tried searching it on the console. I then went to the Xbox app and managed to find a way to install the game from there. Even then, my Xbox claimed I didn’t have the rights to play Hollow Knight: Silksong when I tried booting it up the first couple of times on my console.

Eventually, I was able to start playing. But if you had told me that trying to buy and install Hollow Knight: Silksong would be this much of a hassle back when it was announced in 2019, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Thankfully, the storefronts appear to be functioning better now, so you’ll easily be able to install Team Cherry’s latest over the next couple of days if you do want to play it.

I’m currently playing through the game, and you can expect a review of it on Android Police once I beat Hollow Knight: Silksong.