Hollow Knight hit a new peak of over 71,000 concurrent players on Steam yesterday ahead of the release of its long-awaited sequel.
As shown by data on SteamDB, Hollow Knight previously reached a peak of 56,192 players on August 29, 2025. The day after Silksong’s release announcement at Gamescom, it hit 21,000 concurrent players.
Prior to these new records, Hollow Knight’s highest concurrent player peak was 20,000 in May 2022. Of course, these numbers only represent players on Steam; Hollow Knight is available across multiple platforms, including Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.
Following Silksong’s announcement, almost five million people wishlisted the sequel on Steam according to data from Alinea Analytics.
Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen also spoke to Bloomberg about the game’s seven-year development cycle, confirming that Silksong was “never stuck or anything” and that “games take a lot of time” to make.
“The whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity,” said Gibson. “It was never stuck or anything. It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”
They also shared that Silksong was planned to be an expansion for Hollow Knight, but ended up becoming its own game as development progressed.
“You’re always working on a new idea, new area, new boss,” Pellen added. “That stuff’s so nice. It’s for the sake of completing the game that we’re stopping. We could’ve kept going.”