Hollow Knight fans have waited over seven years to get their hands on Silksong. The sequel to the most popular indie side-scroller was so highly anticipated, games like CloverPit, Faeland, and Demonschool were delayed by a couple months to a year to avoid getting burned by competing with it. The developers of these aforementioned games — and a few others — may have done themselves a favor, because Silksong broke the internet… literally.
Per a report by Ars Technica, Steam saw a large influx of customers eager to purchase Silksong the second after it launched on September 4, causing its storefront to crash. According to DownDetector, over 14,000 reports on Steam’s outage spiked at 10 a.m. EST, as most people received an error page while trying to purchase the game. Meanwhile, the Nintendo eShop had the same type of malfunction after buyers clicked “check out”, the PlayStation Store listed it as “Announced,” and Humble Bumble ran out of Steam keys.
All those issues were resolved within three hours. I managed to download the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Silksong without any issue in the hours since. And as I’m writing this, Silksong has 535,213 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB.
I can’t remember the last time a game broke every digital storefront on launch day. I asked around, and some say they either can’t remember or said nothing at all. All I know is I have never seen a game break the internet as badly as Silksong did — not even Kingdom Hearts 3 or God of War: Ragnarok.
Steam, Nintendo eShop, and other digital game storefronts need to have better systems in place to prevent a server-wide blackout the next time a popular game launches that consumers have been waiting years for, let alone seven years. These blackouts were unprecedented, and players deserve better.
