Hollow Knight: Silksong blew in like a hurricane at the beginning of this month, and it’s already putting up numbers that major developers would envy. Silksong pulled in five million players in just a few days, when factoring in downloads on Game Pass. Now, Silksong is closing in on five million sales across all platforms according to a new report.
The GameDiscoverCo newsletter has shared its latest sales estimates for Hollow Knight: Silksong. 3.2 million copies are estimated to have been sold on Steam, while the game is believed to have pulled in 500,000 copies each on PlayStation 4/5 and Switch 1/2. That would put its current sales total at 4.2 million, without factoring in any sales from the Xbox family of consoles. Those Xbox sales figures aren’t readily available, but the number of Silksong downloads on Xbox Game Pass is estimated to be 1.5 million.
Alinea Analytics has also shared its sales figures for Steam from the week of September 7-13. Borderlands 4 came in at No. 1 with 749,000 sales, and it was closely followed by Silksong with 530,000. Amazingly, the debut of Silksong pushed the original Hollow Knight’s sales to 205,000, taking the No. 4 slot for the week. According to Alinea, this is the third week in a row that Hollow Knight has cracked over 200,000 despite having already sold 15 million copies to date.
Team Cherry’s Silksong success hasn’t come without some grumbling in the industry. Hell is Us’ creative director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête recently criticized Team Cherry for dropping Silksong on September 4 with only two weeks’ notice. Hell is Us had that date staked out for six months, and Jacques-Belletête believes that sales of his game were negatively impacted by Silksong’s sudden arrival.
Some players have contended that the game is too difficult, which immediately led to Silksong mods being designed to make it easier. Team Cherry subsequently released its own patch to lower Silksong’s difficulty, and the studio is currently working on a second patch to tackle bugs.
