Hollow Knight: Silksong has been downloaded more than six million times across PC and console, Alinea Analytics reports, which would put its launch pace far ahead of that of the original Hollow Knight, which did sell well but only crept to 15 million copies over a much longer tail.
Alinea's market analysis head Rhys Elliott dives into September's most-downloaded games in a Substack post, with the new Skate 4 (or skate. if you're wrong) somewhat unsurprisingly taking the number one spot as a free-to-play game in spite of mixed reception.
Alinea has Silksong as the third most-downloaded game for the month at 6.4 million downloads, below EA's FC 26, which, as it happens, is the sort of game analysts expect the company to double down on in the wake of its $55 billion buyout.
That does not represent 6.4 million copies of Silksong sold, mind you, in no small part because Silksong is on Xbox Game Pass. Developer Team Cherry got in right before Microsoft rankled folks with a huge Game Pass price hike, and the Game Pass audience clearly made the most of it.
"Xbox tripled PlayStation's download numbers due to Silksong's Game Pass inclusion," Elliott continues.
However, "Steam accounted for 4 million of those downloads," Elliott writes, and Steam download figures can more reasonably be equated to sales. Estimates from Gamalytic, PlayTracker, and VG Insights, collated on SteamDB, respectively estimate Silksong has sold 4.62 million, 5.84 million, and 6.65 million copies on Steam.
So, 4 million copies sold seems like a pretty fair, even conservative guess for Steam. By player counts alone, Silksong has utterly dwarfed Hollow Knight top to bottom.
Veteran analyst Mat Piscatella of firm Circana previously reported that Steam was far and away Silksong's biggest platform in the US. The game topped 587,000 concurrent players on Valve's store – numbers rarely seen for single-player or indie games, let alone single-player indie games.
