Hollow Knight Silksong Finally Fucking Released and Everyone Lost Their Minds

Here's what went down: Silksong dropped at 7am PT on September 4th with zero warning after six years of radio silence. Team Cherry just tweeted "it's out now" and the entire internet exploded.

I was refreshing Steam like a fucking maniac when everything died. Store page went from "Coming Soon" to completely broken in seconds. Then Twitter lit up with people screaming about Nintendo eShop being dead, PlayStation Store timing out, and Xbox crapping out.

Six Years of Waiting Finally Over

Look, the original Hollow Knight is basically perfect. Sold over 3 million copies and made every other metroidvania look like amateur hour. When Team Cherry announced Silksong back in 2019, people lost their shit. Then... nothing. For years.

Every single gaming community has been circlejerking about Silksong daily. "When Silksong?" became a meme. People were analyzing Team Cherry's breakfast tweets for hidden release date clues. When they finally announced September 4th at Gamescom, Reddit basically crashed.

That six-year buildup meant everyone and their grandmother tried downloading it within minutes of launch.

Why Team Cherry's "Surprise!" Strategy Backfired Spectacularly

Most big releases let you pre-order and preload weeks ahead. Team Cherry said fuck that - "we're not taking your money until we know it actually works." Sounds noble, right?

Wrong. Instead of purchases spread over weeks, literally everyone hit "buy" simultaneously. Every storefront just fucking died under the load. PlayStation was worst - stayed down for maybe 3 hours while Steam limped back after an hour or so.

Player Counts Were Absolutely Bonkers

Once stores stopped shitting themselves, Steam concurrent numbers went completely insane. We're talking higher than most AAA launches, and that's just Steam. Add in Game Pass (it launched day one), Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation and the total has to be huge - though nobody's sharing exact numbers.

Early Steam reviews hit "Overwhelmingly Positive" within hours. People saying it's tighter than the original, which is saying something since Hollow Knight is basically flawless. After six years in the oven, it better be good.

$20 price point is perfect - not trying to gouge people after making them wait forever. Smart move since everyone was going to buy it anyway.

Team Cherry is literally 3 people in Australia who probably expected their little bug game to sell decently. Instead they made something that crashed every major digital storefront simultaneously. I bet they're sitting there going "what the fuck just happened?" (honestly, same)

Most big publishers spread their launches across weeks - early access, pre-orders, regional rollouts, the works. Team Cherry just said "surprise, it's out now" and watched the internet burn down.

The result? Every legitimate fan trying to buy the game basically DDoSed Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all at once. Oops.

Digital Stores Are Apparently Made of Paper

Turns out the entire digital games industry is held together with duct tape and prayers. Steam sells hundreds of games daily but they're usually shitty asset flips that 12 people buy. When something people actually want drops without warning, everything explodes.

PlayStation Store crashes every time they run a sale. Nintendo eShop breaks if you look at it wrong. But all of them dying simultaneously because of one indie game? That's new levels of infrastructure failure.

If a 2D platformer about bugs can murder every storefront, what happens when something actually massive drops unannounced? The whole system's fucked.

Team Cherry's Beautiful Disaster

Picture this: you spend six years making your dream game. Launch day arrives and every store on earth immediately dies. I'd be having a panic attack in the corner.

But honestly? Best possible problem to have. "Game so hyped it broke the internet" is marketing you can't buy. The fact that people kept trying to buy it for hours while stores were down proves the demand is real.

Most indie devs pray for a few thousand sales. Team Cherry accidentally created something with AAA-level hype and learned it the hard way - by watching their launch day turn into controlled chaos.

The player counts once everything came back online were absolutely mental. Higher than most big-budget launches, just from pent-up demand for a bug game made by 3 people who probably just wanted to make something cool (and accidentally murdered the internet in the process).