Hollow Knight: Silksong started tallying some bonkers numbers on Steam charts almost immediately after developer Team Cherry released the long-awaited Metroidvania on September 4, but Silksong seems to be living a very different life on console.
Circana video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella reveals in a series of BlueSky posts that, while Silksong had a wildly successful PC launch – as of writing, its number of concurrents peaked last week with a staggering 587,150 players – it's stumbling a little console, mainly PlayStation. At least in the US.
While the unholy volume of Silksong players made rubble out of most online storefronts during the game's launch, the PlayStation shop remained relatively intact. Notably, the PlayStation Store was also hours late to updating its Silksong listing… but the data Piscatella shared on September 11 suggests that, anyway, many North American PS4 or PS5 players chose to buy the game elsewhere (or not at all).
"As expected, Hollow Knight: Silksong launched strongest on PC," Piscatella writes. On its launch day, Silksong made up more than 7% of the platform's active players in the US, which Piscatella notes made it "3rd overall, behind only Helldivers II and Counter-Strike 2." For US Xbox players, Silksong made a more modest, but still impressive impression – it made up over 2% of that platform's active engagement rate, ranking it as "12th overall," says Piscatella, despite the fact that it was available for free for Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass subscribers.
But on PlayStation in the region, Silksong managed to drag in less than 1% of engagement, making it "55th overall," according to Piscatella. He does not include Nintendo data.
"On Switch 2 I'd imagine the engagement rate is higher, but on a waaaaay smaller installed base. Shrug," he offers. Keep in mind, though, that all these numbers are still confined to just Silksong's release day. "It may pick up over time as word to the more mass market gets out," Piscatella says.
