Hollow Knight: Silksong launched to extraordinary demand on Steam, with concurrent player counts clearing the half‑million mark on day one and rising into the weekend. Within hours of release, the game climbed into Steam’s most‑played chart and, over the first few days, settled among the platform’s largest single‑title peaks. The original Hollow Knight also saw a knock‑on effect, setting fresh highs of its own as players returned to Hallownest or jumped in for the first time.

The headline numbers

Because Steam’s official public charts don’t publish historical peak figures directly in one place, most day‑by‑day peaks you see reported come from third‑party aggregators that read Valve’s APIs. Those services were broadly consistent this time:

Milestone Concurrent Players (Steam) Notes
Launch Day ~500,000+ Crossed the half-million mark within hours
First Friday ~560,000 Peaks climbed further
First Weekend ~587,000 – 600,000 Tracker variance at regional prime times
All-time Context Top ~20 on Steam Among platform’s largest single-title peaks
Series Halo (Hollow Knight 2017) ~70,000 – 85,000 Posted fresh highs during Silksong launch

Note: “Concurrent players” reflects people actively in game at the same moment on Steam. It’s not total copies sold.

Why the numbers differ by a few thousand

Small discrepancies across sites are normal. Trackers poll Valve’s data at different intervals, during different time zones, and some missed snapshots can occur when storefronts buckle under load. Silksong’s launch briefly strained multiple stores, which can skew a single minute’s reading. The practical takeaway is the order of magnitude, not whether a specific snapshot landed at, say, 587,150 versus 590,000.

How big is that in Steam terms?

Silksong’s peak puts it in rare company for a primarily single‑player release. For broad comparison: PUBG’s all‑time Steam peak sits around 3.2 million, while recent blockbuster single‑player‑heavy launches have ranged from just under 1 million to a few million in markets with huge domestic player bases. Long‑tail hits like Terraria and Stardew Valley posted historic peaks in the mid‑hundreds of thousands. Landing in the ~0.58–0.60 million band puts Silksong’s opening among the platform’s most‑played single‑player launches to date.

Steam only tells part of the story

Steam is the only major PC storefront with public, real‑time player charts. Silksong launched simultaneously across PC and consoles, and it’s a day‑one title on a major subscription service. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft don’t publish comparable cross‑platform concurrency, so the true all‑platform peak would be higher than Steam’s visible count, but it isn’t publicly measurable.

Price, platforms, and where to check live charts

Silksong is available for PC and current and last‑gen consoles at a $19.99 list price on Steam; you can find the official product page here. To see what’s trending at any given moment, Valve maintains a live “Most Played” leaderboard on Steam’s charts, which is useful for gauging current concurrency even when weekend peaks fluctuate by region.

What drove the spike

  • Seven years of pent‑up demand, with the game topping wishlists pre‑launch.
  • A modest price point that lowered the barrier to entry.
  • Simultaneous multi‑platform availability, plus day‑one subscription access on console/PC.
  • A resurgence of interest in the original Hollow Knight, which added momentum as players prepped for the sequel.\

Silksong’s first days delivered one of the strongest single‑player surges Steam has seen this year, cresting beyond 500,000 concurrent players and approaching—if not briefly exceeding—600,000 on the opening weekend. Expect the curve to taper as the launch rush passes, but the scale of the peak firmly establishes Team Cherry’s sequel as a top‑tier debut on PC—with total engagement across consoles pushing the real number even higher out of public view.