Hollow Knight: Silksong Has Reportedly Already Cleared 4 Million Sales

By these metrics, in its first two weeks, Silksong has already sold more than four times what the first game did in its initial year; the original Hollow Knight would go on to sell a massive 15 million copies to date, but its sequel is already well on its way to this impressive figure. According to SteamDB, Silksong peaked at 587,150 concurrent players, with a 250K peak in the previous 24 hours, while the original hit its all-time peak 11 days ago with close to 100K players. Basically, the original has become even more popular with the release of its follow-up.

While it has kicked off an ongoing discussion on difficulty in games and two of its earliest bosses were patched to be a tad easier, its developers have largely stuck to their guns. In a recent interview at the ACMI Game Worlds exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, Ari Gibson and William Pellen of Team Cherry explained that while Silksong is tough, this is mitigated by how it gives players options.

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson said. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.

“Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty—but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.” He also said that players “have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.” In accordance with this philosophy, the game’s second major patch is addressed at bug fixes instead of big rebalancing changes.