Hollow Knight Silksong grew by 400K players in less than 3 hours, player retention seems high

Silksong's opening performance may turn into a case study in indie game success, especially with how fast it accumulated over 500K players.

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Hollow Knight Silksong is out now, and it's so popular that it crashed multiple stores on release. Now it's setting new player milestones on Steam and breaking its previous records, achieving over 560K peak players on the platform. The numbers are eye-opening to say the least--to put Silksong's performance into perspective, it had more than double No Man's Sky's all-time peak player count.

One of the things that stood out with Silksong was just how fast that it managed to achieve this player count. I watched the game's player counter grow in real time; in little over two hours, I saw Silksong go from 108,879 players to 535,213, which used to be the previous peak (the game has now beaten this by tens of thousands of users). This means that the game tacked on an additional 426,334 players in just a few hours, increasing its player count by nearly five-fold.

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As per SteamDB, Silksong's player accumulation rate looks like this:

• 12:10 GMT - 108,879 players
• 14:00 GMT - 538,213 players

What's also surprising is that it looks like Silksong has particularly high player retention; the curve of players indicates that a portion of the same gamers may be returning to Silksong on day 2, which is a great sign for long-term player engagement.

And Silksong is still the #1 top selling game on Steam, plus it's now the #3 most-played game by current players.

Given the first game's acclaim and Metroidvania gameplay, it's not necessarily surprising that people who bought a tough platforming game would return and jump back in on day 2. But it's still a strong sign of what very well could be the most successful indie game of the year.

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