Hollow Knight: Silksong finally dropped after nearly eight years of anticipation, and as expected, the hype train went full throttle. Within 3 hours of release, Silksong sales cracked into Steam’s Top 3 most-played games list, peaking at 535,213 concurrent players at the time of writing. Many even reported that the flood of fans dying to be the first to play crashed the Steam Store and other storefronts.
But it’s not just the Steam charts lighting up. We looked into several popular torrent trackers and found that more than 16,000 seeders and leechers have already hopped aboard the hypetrain — illegally. The numbers are climbing across various repacks and uploads as well.
Obviously, this snapshot isn’t telling the full story. On PC alone, Game Pass users, Epic, and GOG buyers aren’t being tracked here. Not to mention that Silksong is out on Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation, and Xbox devices. The real player count on PC and consoles could already be well into the millions and Steam’s 500,000 CCU is just the tip of the iceberg.
However, the same goes for piracy. Public torrent trackers are only the surface layer; private trackers and direct downloads, which are far harder to monitor, likely hold just as many. It doesn’t help that Hollow Knight: Silksong is readily available on GOG, which means it wasn’t sold with any DRM protection. This allows pirates to have an even easier time redistributing the game freely. With that in mind, there’s a huge chance that the 10,000 figure is more of a floor than a ceiling.
Does that mean Silksong‘s sales and success are in jeopardy? I doubt it. If anything, the fact that people are pirating it so aggressively on day one is, for lack of a better word, a sign of demand. And demand usually translates into sales. A common rule of thumb suggests that peak concurrent players represent about 10% of total buyers, give or take. With Hollow Knight: Silksong already hitting 535,000 CCU, that calculation would put its sales past 5 million copies.
Looking back at Hollow Knight‘s success, it probably won’t take long until Team Cherry announces the game’s actual sales milestone. For now, the only certainty is this: the wait for Silksong is finally over and the hype is real, whether you’re playing legit or not.
