Hollow Knight reaches 33K peak players on Steam after Silksong reveal

The original Hollow Knight game is seeing a surge in popularity as fans eagerly anticipate Silksong's impending release.

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After years of development, Hollow Knight Silksong is finally coming out in two weeks. To say that fans are excited is an understatement; the Silksong release date reveal has gotten over 4 million views on YouTube, a view count that's very close to Silksong's reveal trailer from 2019. This indicates that the same people who were excited before are still excited now.

The buzz over Silksong has led to more success for the first game. Hollow Knight has seen an influx of players on Steam, where it just reached 33,062 peak players for the first time. The previous record for Hollow Knight's peak players had been set in May 2022 with little over 20,000 people.

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It's not just returning players, either. More people are buying Hollow Knight thanks to the energy surrounding Silksong.

According to Valve's own sales charts, Hollow Knight is #52 right now on the top best-selling Steam games. Interestingly enough, Hollow Knight didn't receive a timed discount to help these sales, and Valve notes that the game hadn't been on the top 100 list for quite some time before this week.

This indicates that the buzz around Silksong has organically uplifted Hollow Knight's peak player count as well as its overall sales. Such an effect is something that billion-dollar AAA studios try to capture every time they release a new sequel, and a new tactic is to use film and TV show adaptations of video games to try to spark more sales.

But for Team Cherry, all of this is happening because fans genuinely love their games and want to play more. That's a great sign for indies and the games industry as a whole.