Hollow Knight: Silksong’s launch brought a few storefronts crashing down. 

Good news: Hollow Knight: Silksong is officially here! Bad news: its release has brought multiple game storefronts crashing down. Team Cherry’s highly-anticipated Metroidvania sequel first announced its release date two weeks ago during the week of Gamescom, but even at such short notice, gamers have apparently shown up in droves to hit purchase on the game. 

When the game launched, Steam and the Nintendo eShop were both briefly rendered inaccessible. On the PlayStation Store, the option to purchase Hollow Knight: Silksong was entirely unavailable. 

Hollow Knight: Silksong’s launch brings video game storefronts crashing down

It’s safe to say that Hollow Knight: Silksong was an incredibly highly-anticipated release, but it’s unlikely that even Team Cherry was expecting this game’s launch to go down the way that it has. At the exact moment the game launched globally (10pm GMT+8), Steam servers went down, and users were greeted with an error when trying to access Hollow Knight: Silksong’s store page. 

Steam users were greeted with this error message when Hollow Knight: Silksong launched (Image: GosuGamers).

Over on the Nintendo eShop, I personally tried to purchase the game–which appeared as a featured title on the front page of the eShop–and was met with repeated error messages and lagging UI, signalling that the storefront was having trouble bearing the weight of a sudden influx of buyers. 

Steam has come back online at the time of writing, with Steam Status indicating that only a few regions are still seeing a “medium load” of activity. The Nintendo eShop remains slow to navigate, but has also come back online. The game is still unavailable for purchase on the PlayStation Store. SteamDB lists over 100,000 concurrent players in-game right now, so clearly, many have already downloaded and begun playing the sequel.

The trouble with Hollow Knight: Silksong’s launch seems to have only lasted 20 minutes at most, but it remains clear evidence of just how strong the anticipation has become around its launch.