The impending Silksong release date drives droves of fans back to the OG Hollow Knight, which has doubled its Steam player peak 8 years after launch

Hollow Knight: Silksong is right around the corner, but thousands of players are flocking back to the original metroidvania to get reacquainted with the world, see what all the overwhelming hype is about, or just quieten the Silksong cravings.

On Friday night, the original Hollow Knight had already reached a new personal record for peak concurrent Steam players with over 20,000 bug-squashers logged in at the same time. Since then, that record has almost doubled. On Sunday evening that number is now at 39, 356 concurrent players.

There are plenty of Steam games that easily eclipse that number, of course, with more concurrent players at this very moment, but what makes Team Cherry's achievement so notable is that Hollow Knight came out in 2017. Eight years ago. And it's a single-player game.

The sweeping internet hype for Silksong has been pushing the first game to new heights for a while, though. Every game event or Nintendo Direct stream's chat has been relentlessly spammed by "Skong?" comments for years, and the subreddit's descent into hopium has gone viral many a time.

It's not just online noise, either. Team Cherry itself said Hollow Knight has sold 12 million copies since the sequel's announcement - 15 million overall - clearly showing the hype really did translate to sales.

We'll see how much higher the Steam numbers can climb before Hollow Knight Silksong comes out on PC, PS5, Switch 2, Switch 1, Xbox Series X|S, and Game Pass on September 4.

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