Well, who could have seen this coming: Hollow Knight: Silksong has taken Steam offline, or at least, laid waste to large swathes of it. Within seconds of its release this afternoon, Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight sequel brought Valve's servers to a halt, cue endlessly loading pages when trying to access the checkout, browse the store or do much of anything.
I can’t even sign in. I’m currently staring into the void of an infinite “loading user data” loop. I can’t get the “Most Played” chart to load in a web browser, either, but according to SteamDB, there are 101,828 people playing already. Smash cut to live footage of Gabe Newell ejected screaming from his exploding yacht, hotly pursued by a cloud of burning hornets.
If you’re hoping to play on Steam in the next hour or so, you may encounter the following dread message: "Error Code: 2811-7429. Couldn't connect to the server. The network may be busy, or there may be a problem with the server. Please try again later." There are already thousands of reports of a Steam outage on Downdetector. Valve have yet to comment. The game is also available on GOG, who have a much smaller audience, but I hear they’re having similar difficulties.
May the good gods save our engineers in this time of Silksinging. May the good gods save them, at least, from wrathful emails. Having to wait an hour or two for demand to die back so you can play Silksong is no great burden. Still, as ever with Steam overloads, you do have to wonder whether Valve as a whole could have prepared better for this.
Silksong has been Steam’s most-wishlisted game since forever. I’m not clear on what Valve do when they know something is going to be mega-popular - I assume it involves buying more servers, but perhaps they just pour energy drinks over the existing ones while uttering the Optimiser’s Prayer. Perhaps they just stick a bike pump in the outer wall of the server farm and have an intern crank the handle for 24 hours.
If you’re trying to play, best of luck. James claims he’s already got it downloading, but then he’s always trying to be the popular one.
