After a long and arduous seven-year wait, I don't think there was ever any doubt that Hollow Knight: Silksong was going to be anything other than a phenomenon. Somehow, it still managed to even surpass that.
The second it launched, it broke almost every major storefront, including Steam, the Nintendo eShop, and the PlayStation Store, and within a handful of hours, it had already broken half a million concurrent players on Steam.
That number of players is the dream for almost every developer, and it's the 18th highest concurrent player count the Valve-owned platform has ever seen, but when compared to its contemporaries, Silksong's 535,000 players is the second-highest an indie game has ever achieved.
In the history of Steam, only one indie game has ever achieved more concurrent players than Hollow Knight: Silksong (if you exclude Banana, a 'game' in which you literally just click on a banana over and over).
The single indie game to beat Hollow Knight: Silksong's whopping player count is a social deduction game called Goose Goose Duck, which was released on October 3, 2021, and peaked at just over 700,000 players in January 2023.
It's worth noting that Goose Goose...
