On September 4, 2025, Hollow Knight: Silksong's highly anticipated release caused an unprecedented outage on major gaming platforms like Steam due to the influx of players, which might be just a glimpse of what's coming when Grand Theft Auto 6 launches. The fact that Hollow Knight: Silksong could cause such a stir in the industry is impressive, especially for a $20 indie game. Still, its scale in terms of budget and development team is nowhere near what Rockstar is putting into Grand Theft Auto 6, the sequel to a game that broke six world sales records on its launch day.
Hollow Knight: Silksong's success was inevitable, as it was already wishlisted by over five million users on Steam alone. Other publishers were well aware of its influence, which is why so many games delayed their release to avoid launching on the same day. But few expected this small indie game to cause an industry-wide blackout, getting some people to think about how much bigger releases like GTA 6 might shake up the industry.
In what fans are now calling the "Silksong Incident," Steam faced an almost two-hour outage on September 4, with over 70,000 users reporting issues on Downdetector,...
