Hollow Knight: Silksong made a grand entrance early this month, quickly achieving impressive figures that would be the envy of many established developers. The game attracted five million players within days, including Game Pass downloads. A recent report indicates that Silksong is now nearing five million units sold across all platforms.
According to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, the most recent sales projections for Hollow Knight: Silksong show approximately 3.2 million copies sold on Steam. An additional 500,000 units each are estimated to have been purchased on PlayStation 4/5 and Switch 1/2, bringing the total estimated sales to 4.2 million. This figure excludes sales on Xbox consoles, for which specific data is not readily available. However, an estimated 1.5 million downloads of Silksong have occurred via Xbox Game Pass.
Furthermore, Alinea Analytics reported Steam sales figures for the week of September 7-13. During this period, Borderlands 4 led with 749,000 sales, with Silksong following closely behind at 530,000 units. Remarkably, Silksong`s launch also boosted sales of the original Hollow Knight, which sold 205,000 copies, securing the fourth position for the week. Alinea notes that this marks the third consecutive week the original Hollow Knight has exceeded 200,000 sales, despite its lifetime sales already surpassing 15 million units.
Despite Team Cherry`s success with Silksong, its launch wasn`t entirely without controversy within the industry. Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, creative director of Hell is Us, publicly criticized Team Cherry for releasing Silksong on September 4th with only two weeks` prior announcement. Hell is Us had long reserved this release date, and Jacques-Belletête suggested that his game`s sales suffered due to Silksong`s unexpected arrival.
Initially, some players found the game excessively challenging, prompting the swift creation of community-made mods to reduce its difficulty. In response, Team Cherry issued its own official patch to adjust Silksong`s difficulty level and is currently developing a second patch aimed at resolving various bugs.