The highly anticipated sequel to Hollow Knight officially released on September 4, 2025. Hollow Knight: Silksong, originally intended to be a DLC for the first game, was originally announced in 2019 with the video titled, “Hollow Knight: Silksong Reveal Trailer.” Its last development update before the announcement of its 2025 release date through a April 2025 Nintendo Direct, was in December 2020, through an Edge article written by Jonathan Bolding. Finally, two weeks before its release date on August 21, 2025, Team Cherry revealed the release trailer for Hollow Knight: Silksong.

After spending seven years in development and a dedicated fanbase that has been eagerly awaiting the game since its announcement in 2019, it was inevitable that the game would cause a stir. In fact, the announcement of its release date was enough to lead other development teams into the decision to postpone their game’s release, a list of which can be found in Jenni Lada’s article for SiliconeSteamra. And, according to the Alinea Insight newsletter by Rhys Elliott from August 14, 2025, Silksong found a home on 4.8 million Steam wishlists and bolstered Hollow Knight’s sales, bringing the total to over 9 million copies sold on Steam alone.

Other than demos available at conventions through the years, Silksong continued to remain elusive. According to a Bluesky post by Jason Schreier, Team Cherry made the decision to not release early codes for Silksong to critics, due to feeling like “it’d be unfair for critics to be playing before Kickstarter backers and other players.” So, other than the gameplay teasers, words of the developers, and those who were lucky enough to experience the demo, there were no early reviews or opinions on Silksong. That meant everyone, even critics, would be scrambling to purchase Silksong on September 4th.

In case you’re wondering: Team Cherry told me they don’t plan on sending out early codes for Silksong (they felt like it’d be unfair for critics to be playing before Kickstarter backers and other players), so don’t expect to see reviews until after the game comes out

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier.bsky.social) August 21, 2025 at 12:53 PM

With a simultaneous release on Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, Xbox, and Steam, many figured they would be able to find a purchase on one of the platforms. To the surprise, or perhaps not, of many, the stores could not handle the massive wave of eager players. Many purchasers found themselves met with variations of an error, from Steam’s “Something Went Wrong” message, to an Error Code and inability to connect to the server for Nintendo eShop. Additionally, the game launched two hours late on PlayStation platforms. Despite these troubles, Silksong rocketed to an astounding concurrent player count on Steam of 100,000 after the first 45 minutes of availability. At the time of writing, 6:50 pm UTC-5, Silksong has 401,598 Steam players in-game. Despite other platforms lacking easily accessed data regarding player count, it is safe to say that Silksong had an incredibly successful launch.