Hollow Knight: Silksong causes server chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo | Hacker News Reader

Hollow Knight: Silksong causes server chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo

eurogamer.net

217 pointsAndrewDucker157 comments

Had no issues getting it on GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/hollow_knight_silksong

Wait the original was only $15?! I got Hollow Knight in a Humble Bundle so I had no idea how cheap that amazing game was.

No wonder Silksong is only $20. I saw the memes about the devs asking for $20 and assumed it was $20 more like $60=>$80 or something like that.

It was $20 when I got it.

It's just three blokes and a bunch of contractors. According to Wikipedia Hollow Knight sold more than 15 million copies, at $15 that's $225M. Of course you have store fees, and discounts, and taxes, and whatnot, but all of that accounted for they still made at least dozens of millions – if not more.

It's unclear if they would make more money if it was much more expensive. I picked it up for €19.50 today; not sure I would have paid €80.

Definitely a unicorn success story. I’d be curious about Balatro in a similar vein—-labor of love turns wildly successful

I could get it for $7.99 :thinking:

Same. Bought it about 45 minutes after it launched, and though the download was a bit slow, it was steady and installed just fine.

I've been playing it since t=0, also downloaded from GOG>

Reminds me of how I found a switch light by thinking, “what’s the place that would have a Switch that would most surprise people they carried them?”

What place did that turn out to be?

I want to say Target but that’s too obvious. I think instead it was one of the regional Target wannabes with an electronics section. Those seem to be used more for bribery and by forgetful parents who forgot to get birthday presents.

Back in the day I found an Xbox 360 2 days after release in a bombed out Circuit City.

I got it from Humble Bundle and redeemed the key on Steam :)

It’s a curious situation, the reason why it’s not pulling record sales in the first hours, is because nobody can buy it since everybody is trying to buy it at the same time. Steam store checkout is off for 2h already!

A few years ago, I was feeling dispirited about being middle-aged and had come around to the conclusion that, at least when playing games, my general dissatisfaction and "meh" response to the games I was playing was probably a function of my age rather than anything about the games themselves. I was enjoying some games to an extent, but I wasn't being really grabbed by anything, and I was having a hard time sticking with much that I was playing. It seemed like a reasonable just-so story, and a particular exhausting one if you make games and theoretically are supposed to like them.

And then I picked up Hollow Knight, was utterly sucked into it in a deep way, couldn't put it down, and came out the other side doing the Principle Skinner meme - "Am I so out of touch? No, it's all those other games that have been wrong..."

So thank you Team Cherry, for helping remind me that 1) I really can love games deeply, even in my tired middle-aged-ness, and 2) sometimes the problem isn't that a person is being too judgmental, the problem is that the the lofty potential of their ideals really is, perhaps, justified, and other creative people (for a variety of understandable reasons, really - making games is a hard and costly business) mostly aren't even really aiming for such things.

I do most of my gaming in the single-player indie space these days. It's really where the fun is. You have a deep time-tested catalog of beautiful and complete experiences that don't try to nickel-and-dime you with drip-fed content or recurring microtransactions. They're games first and foremost, not extraction machines. It's the opposite of the BS you see in big-budget titles.

Indies as main course, occasional AAA snacks ;)

Most AAA games are over pretty quickly, so they are quite suitable for that role.

Ironically, the AAA "snacks" cost triple the amount the indie games cost.

Not if you wait long enough :>

Absolutely. I've been playing a lot of Stationeers (which, wildly, requires writing assembly on the in-game chips) and Satisfactory lately. Both are clearly labors of love by their small dev houses.

Felt a similar way when playing Expedition 33 earlier this year. Such a great game.

When I was young there were two types of games I tended to enjoy: single-player games (e.g. Nethack, Half-life, Starcraft, & others with a good story and gameplay, or just deep gameplay) and LAN party games (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Total Annihilation, Quake II, and similar). LAN party games were more fun at LAN parties than online, and not just because server browsers all kind of sucked. Playing along with other people you can see in the same room is a very different experience from playing along with other people you've never met, can't see, and will never encounter again.

These days my friends are scattered across the country, with jobs & families, and so LAN parties are basically dead. And many new games don't even support LAN play, instead they tend to be optimized for online play with some sort of ranking system.

That leaves single-player games. And really good single-player games are rare, just like really good anything is rare. I find a lot of story-driven singleplayer games have good stories, but crap gameplay, so it's frustrating to try to complete the story. If the story is good enough & the gameplay bad enough I'll just cheat & treat the whole thing more like a book or movie instead of a game, but for a lot of games I just don't bother even with that.

But occasionally a game grabs me. The story is great, and the gameplay is at least good enough, or it's just really good gameplay that stays engaging for a long time (e.g. Slay the Spire). These are few & far between, because making really good games is very difficult.

As I age my tolerance for mediocrity decreases, partly because I already own a whole bunch of still-engaging games I can always play. So I agree with your points. The really great games are rare, far rarer than best-selling games.

FWIW there is a new-ish kind of intermediate genre between classic LAN/ranked multiplayer and single player, which is the whole “survival” genre. Generally speaking, they can be played as single player games, but also allow for small-scale co-op, synchronously or asynchronously. So even if you and a buddy have different schedules, you can make progress separately but still occasionally play together.

Valheim, Grounded, Ark, Satisfactory are a few among many others.

The tree punching genre hasn't satisfied either of those things for me.

Nothing sucks the fun out of survival games like your friend who has way more time progressing the game far too much while you're absent.

I'm going to start playing Claire Obscure this weekend. Looking forward to it, first game in a while I'm exited to play in a long while.

Same here. Hollow Knight and Elden Ring are the only two games in the last decade that I've put more than a few hours into. E.g I used to love Civilization, but none of them since 4 have done it for me. Same with Simcity2000. I'll play Madden or Fortnite with my kids, but I'm done mentally after 20 minutes.

The last game I liked like these was Morrowind back in 2004 or so. One of the great things about being a parent is sharing these kinds of things with your kids. I've already got Silksong downloaded on our Switch and XBox to play together when they get home from school in ~1 hr.

I've been keeping reviews in the last few years. Just privately, for myself. I started doing this because I couldn't remember what I did and didn't play, and had a "wait, I think I tried this before and didn't like it" deja-vu a few times.

Right now the rankings are: bad (388), meh (191), okay (71), good (63), superb (12). Turns out I dislike a lot of games. This is also why I started to just pirate things first and then buy if I like it; I have 558 games in my GOG library and I barely played (or like) >80% of it.

I can recommend keeping reviews by the way; I've since started doing this for tons of stuff, from games to films to TV episodes to wine to coffee, and writing things down really helps narrow down what you like or dislike about things. By keeping it private you can write whatever you like and don't need to do a "full" review. For example my entire review for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (rated "meh") is "Too fast-paced for my liking. Also don't really like the controls." And for me, that's enough.

I can write a long essay on why I like or dislike games, but to be honest I'd rather be playing Silksong.

Would you mind posting the list of superb games?

Sure: https://gist.github.com/arp242/3800893c531d185abfd06f82ed0c3...

Going over things, the dividing line between "good" and "superb" is somewhat arbitrary, so I included both, because well, why not? I did it like that to mimic the commonly used "5 star" rating, but maybe it should just be three: "bad", "okay", "good". Dunno.

Also note that I haven't played many games. I'm just now getting around to The Witcher 3, which is over ten years old. So...

"-" starts a new entry, followed by one or more titles, followed by "tag: value", followed by whatever I wanted to write (if anything) as Markdown. It lists "superb" first, alphabetically, then "good".

have you played ori and the blind forest? that's another nice single player platformer, though it eventually proved too hard for me (can't really do the pixel-and-timing-perfect moves and don't much enjoy trying)

I believe there is a function of age to some degree, I 100% Assassins creed 2 at 14 and now I have a decade and a half of watching studios remake that goddamn game. They're all trying to make the best practice, safest game they can to reach the widest audience and end up bland with nothing new to offer those of us that have been playing a longer time.

Almost all my favourite titles of the last decade have been smaller titles, even the ones I bounce off I can appreciate them for trying something and missing the mark, there are genuine amazing works of art out there that a large studio simply can't produce.

I don't think the AAA games are 'wrong', to my bewilderment assassins creed sells like crazy each year despite near everyone in my friendship circle tapping out after the pirate one a decade ago, it's just if you play more than a couple things a year you outgrow the 'mainstream' titles.

I typically tend toward indie/small games as well, but there arw definitely some masterpieces put out by large studios. Have you played Red Dead Redemption or Cyberpunk? The amount of fidelity and content and refinement are just unmatched. I can't recommend them enough.

Also, if you like first-person puzzlers I recently picked up Supraworld and instantly fell in love, it's a gamer's game for sure and is one of the best platformers I've played in quite a while.

The thing that stuck with me after learning about it is that AAA games aren't called AAA because they are supposed to be the best of the best or the most advanced.

AAA games are named after AAA investment ratings. A AAA game is supposed to be the most profitable investment for the publisher paying the upfront investment. And the market has gotten saturated with enough customers that doing new things to get more customers is more risky than doing the same thing to keep your existing customers.

Perhaps allowing preorders for a day or two might have helped spread the load? Or at least moved it earlier so that the checkout load didn't overlap with the load from users downloading.

Very surprised they didn’t do preorders for this

They get extra publicity for crashing Steam. That's quite an achievement these days!

I was thinking about this for the recent GMTK game jam, which crashed itch.io.

Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.

1. That's Valve's prerogative, not the developer's. If they're not partnered with Valve they may not have had the option to enact pre-purchases. [1]

2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.

[1]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/prepurchase

#2 seems like a technically solvable problem: AES-encrypt the preload and distribute the key on launch day.

I thought they already did something like this. I recall some people complaining because the naive decryption process would double the required hard drive space while the bundle was unpacking on release day.

There is no need for the decryption to double the needed size. You can chunk it to something reasonable and effectively rewrite the file in place.

Pretty sure they already do it. I've also noticed that if you have a fast connection (like 1 Gb/s down), it might be faster to download the game when it releases than it is to preload it and then decrypt it, since the decryption process is quite slow.

Of course they do. GGP has no idea what they are talking about.

You don't believe Team Cherry's prior sales of Hollow Knight would reach the bar noted in the docs you linked?

Aside, your second point is incorrect. The SteamDB folks have a public write up on analysis of the preload system: https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-download-system/

They could've enabled pre-orders on Nintendo and Xbox

Shared mostly as an example of how sometimes even the big sites can't stay up when too many people try to use them at once.

With all the recent news about the demise of the game industry, it's nice to see lots of demand for a game, especially an indie title.

There is not a lot of computer games that I would classify as art instead of just entertainment, but Hollow knight is definitely one of those.

It's success is well-deserved.

Certainly well-deserved.

I have a similar list of _art_ instead of most _entertainment_, and Hollow Kight there together with Disco Elysium

Exactly, just like Spelunky 2 and Ufo 50

In my experience, the computer games that classify as art today are mostly developed by small studios

You get all these photo-realistic graphics games, and people comparing making games to making movies in terms of size of team and cost, and then something like a platform game with 2D graphics based on doodles crashes download servers.

I'm probably being naive, but I feel surprised that in 2025, a platform like Steam (which has existed for well over 2 decades and has around 70M DAU) is having this type of issues. I don't want to downplay the complex engineering behind scale and massive surges of demand, but it's not like it's their first rodeo. What seems to be blocking users from getting the game is accepting payments, nothing computationally complex per se IMO

Huge spikes over a short period of time are hard to deal with for anyone, and payment processors have their own infra whose scalability Steam can't necessarily control.

No system is completely redundant proof. It's just a matter of money and infrastructure. They didn't have any preorder system in place even so everyone had to search, buy and download all at the same time. It's probably close if not more than a million people waiting for a countdown to buy it.

Bad planning, maybe but definitely not a conspiracy against the game.

In this specific instance, I am mildly surprised preorders weren't offered. That would have taken some load off their servers and granted them money sooner; win-win for them.

That's because the studio's ethics are against pre-orders (and of course any type of lootboxes, microtransactions etc). I'm also happy they settled on a relatively low price tag of 19.50€, other studios would have marked it around 60€ to milk their user's wallets taking advantage of all the anticipation built up these years, kudos to team cherry

Interesting. I hadn't considered the possibility that the studio had a say in the preorder process, since the marketplace company is a separate company.

Agree with you actually, I think every 'gamer' has bitten the bullet on a pre order and been very disappointed. It's usually the publishers decision in the end and it's to guage demand, but in this case, it shows there is a less greedy reason for doing it sometimes.

90% preorders are terrible deals. Games are bugfest on launch. There was one game I violated no-preorder policy of mine - Cyberpunk, and everybody knows how it went (very poorly).

No-preorders is basically same as no-capes. Just don't do it.

Payment systems turn out to be particularly thorny because they hit an intersection of technical issues with conflicting goals:

* You want them to be as fast as possible (ideally: instantaneous)

* You want them to be validated (long-poll to a third party validation service)

* You need them to be sequentially auditable (this is a "... or you could go to jail" requirement)

* If a failure occurs, you don't want to be out your own money

While these are solvable, it's the reason that so many cloud services suddenly hit scaling issues at the payments layer: things are going great and then that layer gets involved and "oops, hold on, we're waiting on Visa's servers. Still waiting. Stillllll waiiiiiting..........." Or the team was certain they'd simultaneously solved speed and sequential auditability this time but, oops, there's yet another sequencing point that's actually a bottleneck.

Credit card based payment systems really shouldn't suffer these kinds of problems: The entire reason why credit cards exist in the first place (compared to debit cards) is to enable distributed, asynchronous, eventually-consistent payments. It should be perfectly normal for a business like steam to simply store the details necessary to process payment and then eventually reconcile with them, at a pace that the processors can handle. Instead we've built a world that operates under physics-violating assumptions. Gah.

What I don't understand is why Steam and others don't use a torrent-like protocol on their back-end to reduce their bandwidth requirements large numbers of customers downloading the game at the same time. Back in the day WOW used used it for distributing large patches it seems to be a solved problem.

In an interview, Gabe commented on his very question. Answer was that this involves a bunch of technical complexity vs just spending money on the problem. Steam also has such an enormous library now vs a single game company that you are still going to be mostly dependent on a few huge seeders.

i mean on the one hand yeah on the other its not that big of a technical problem. having one game vs hundreds well torrent trackers have been doing that since forever, and yeah you would need super seeders but isnt that still less load than have to run a http or upt based download server?

They actually have implemented this in a very limited context. You can download games from other machines on your local network.

For any P2P protocols to work, including BitTorrent, you need to be able to access the other nodes. In today's world, that's becoming harder because everyone and their granny are gradually being hidden behind a strict CGNAT.

IPv6 ??

That's the implicated solution to this problem, correct.

But you have a bunch of people on HN opposed to it for no good reason other than "IPv4 works for me™".

Downloading the game wasn't a problem for anyone, as far as I know the CDN held up fine. The problem was the steam storefront, i.e. actually buying the game.

This makes sense because there are several live service games on steam that have hundreds of thousands of active players - any update will put a large instantaneous load on the CDN as all the clients are forced to update at the same time, and this happens extremely frequently so they've had to get good at handling it.

What doesn't happen very frequently is hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy a game at exactly the same time, because most games have pre-orders.

Why then does Path of Exile (especially the new 2, which is only 1-2 steps in popularity below Silksong right now on SteamDB) bothers with still including a predownload torrent on every big update ?

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3829091

The PoE torrent is for their own distribution of their game (as opposed to Steam/Epic, with which the torrent can't be used) - I imagine Grinding Gear's own distribution stack is not as robust as the big ol' platforms.

The fact that every platform, even the biggest, richest, and most "has their shit together" you can name, has had this problem at some point, points to it not actually being as solvable as you would expect.

Also considering how Steam gets hammered every big sale launch. Well I am not even sure that hurts their sales that much. So as long as your site continues to somewhat work and you recover in hours it is not in the end big deal.

I think pay to view events might have hardest time as then there is actual need to be available at that exact time.

>I think pay to view events might have hardest time as then there is actual need to be available at that exact time.

True, though many of them have at least an hour or two of intro/opening ceremony/commentary to troubleshoot as people slowly join, so it's not the end of the world if the stream crashes up top.

Is something wrong in payment and/or entertainment spaces? Not just that there is ongoing censorship problem, but there's also sudden increase of PC port of mobile games, and now this. Feels like there could be common root cause of a profitability problem.

It's not like this kind of thing happens everyday. If Valve spent the money and effort to prevent itself from something like this, it could, but would it be worth it?

Would you recommend playing the first before diving into this or is it safe to just pick this up and go?

I don't think anyone has played far enough into Silksong to say for certain yet, but the first game is so story-light that I can't imagine you'd be lost if you skip ahead. You really shouldn't though, the first one is very good.

I would go so far as to say the story from the first is obtuse. I had to read a few story synopses that pulled all of the threads together. Very much a show don’t tell situation.

No-one can know that for the next dozen hours or so. There were no early review copies, which means no-one knows if Silksong benefits from knowing the story, mechanics, or world of the first game

If you like metroidvanias, the first is an absolute gem. Whether you do it first or second, you shouldn't miss it.

Hollow Knight is a great game, even with the fact from a story PoV you can probably skip it, I simply do not recommend it. To most (myself among them, and metroidvanias are one of my favorite genres), HK is one of the games at the pinnacle of the genre.

Not having touched Silksong yet, I'd recommend playing the Hollow Knight first. It holds up really well and is absolutely worth a play through. I think sometimes a sequel releases and it makes the original feel hard to go back to, if it's added new features or quality of life things. If I were in your position, I think having the "uncontaminated" experience of Hollow Knight is worth it.

That is, unless you really want to feel like you're part of the conversation these first few weeks after Silksong comes out.

gog has it on sale for $7.50. So I'll give it a shot!

I love regional pricing. I can get this game for $4.99 (and maybe an extra offer if it ever has). But I already bought it on the Nintendo eShop for $0.15, so I will play it on there. As I previously said, I LOVE regional pricing.

Maybe, but the first one was so incredible, why not play it first?

Silksong is supposed to be a standalone story so play order does not matter.

If you do, use a guide or something to get through Hollow Knight. If you 100% Hollow Knight you’ll probably be too burnt out to pick up Silksong for a while.

I don't think that's necessary. Hollow Knight is a game whose appeal comes from exploring a massive, beautiful world and and discovering its secrets -- using a guide would take away a lot of the fun, at least for me.

Yeah, HK is a huge game and Silksong is probably bigger; it'll take a while to play through both. But that's a good thing. Play these games for the experience of playing them, no need to rush through them just to check them off a list.

Lots of us have work and families and don’t have time to organically figure out the insane steps to go down some of the late stage paths.

Of course. I usually don't 100% metroidvanias for this reason. But I also don't usually look up a guide (unless I really want to find a specific boss or secret or something). I just put the game down and come back to it later if I want to keep exploring it.

There's nothing wrong with using a guide if that's how you have the most fun. But I think most people would have more fun playing Hollow Knight without one, which is why I don't think "if you [play Hollow Knight], use a guide or something" is good advice as an unqualified statement. I enjoy the experience of playing a game far more than the accomplishment of having completed it, so I'd rather enjoy a game fully and leave it unfinished than halfheartedly rush through it with a guide.

And for the same reason, you don't _have_ to do Path of Pain, or Pantheon.

I did about 102% of Hollow Knight, mostly without a guide and loved it.

So, yes, I probably should have qualified my statement.

I meant this more if my parent wanted to get through Hollow Knight quickly, as a gateway for Silksong.

I say this because just thinking about playing Silksong immediately after finishing HK made me feel exhausted.

I wouldn't recommend playing HK in this manner though; it's more fun to explore, and use a guide only if you really hit a wall.

So, yeah in hindsight probably bad advice even after qualification.

The whole point of the game and genre is the exploration. A guide kinda defeats that.

If you don't like the backtracking (I hated it), then the game is probably not for you.

What a weird comment. The whole point of any game is to have fun.

If someone enjoys playing a game with a guide, what's the problem exactly ?

How do you know if you enjoy playing the game without a guide if you don't do it? Looking something up to unstuck yourself is one thing, but following a guide from beginning to end is robbing yourself of the opportunity to enjoy the game as presented.

"beating the game as quickly as possible" is such an obviously flawed reason to use a guide that I won't even respond to it. If you don't have the time to play the game, don't.

It's the thing about type I fun and type II fun, where type I is "fun while it's happening" and type II is "not fun while it's happening but fun in retrospect": if you don't use a guide, the type II fun that results may be greater in quality and impact than the type I fun you'd get using a guide

I mostly agree, and would say you should just play it blind. If you care about getting 100% (112% after the DLC) there are probably a couple of things where looking them up would be useful. It is also a very big world, so trying to do cleanup once you have all exploration tools can be quite involved

It is very much worth playing but you could probably skip it. As others have alluded to, the storytelling is very influenced by Fromsoft (Souls games, basically) and is pretty oblique. But, even without following it exactly, the gameplay itself is still great, and the music and art do an excellent job setting up a melancholy vibe. The different zones have a lot of personality.

Addendum: having now had the chance to start on Silksong, strongly recommend Hollow Knight first. That's not because of story, but because Silksong seems like it's geared to be noticeably more difficult than Hollow Knight was, both in platforming and in combat. (One of the things that I think Hollow Knight did really well was the spread of available difficulties. Beating the game isn't too hard; getting the true ending involves a few more specific difficult tests; and the DLC added boss gauntlets that let you go pretty crazy with how hard you want to make it.)

In addition to what others have said, my understanding from Team Cherry's few reveals over the years since HK released is that Silksong takes place in a different location than Hallownest, the setting of Hollow Knight (though within the same world). Thus, given that most of the story of Hollow Knight is about Hallownest and what happened there, it is likely that you wouldn't miss much besides a few cool little connections by playing Silksong first.

Hollow Knight is a classic. If you enjoy Metroidvania style games you’ll love (almost) every minute. The music and sound effects are great too, so it’s worth playing with headphones if your gaming setup is in an environment with heavy background noise.

That being said, from what I’ve played of Silksong so far, it doesn’t seem to be crafted such that you’ll get the most out of the gameplay only if you played HK. Full appreciation of the in-game lore you’ll discover in Silksong is probably another matter, but even then I think playing them in either order will be a good time. Enjoy!

No need to play the first plot-wise but Silksong is significantly harder. I’d strongly recommend playing HK first.

Well, there goes my week.

I have a hard time getting into games anymore, but hollow knight was one that actually kept my attention enough to finish. Super great game!

Then, if you haven't already tried it, I can heartily recommend Nine Sols as well. Not _quite_ up there with HK, but not too far behind ...

I found Nine Sols to be superior, much more engaging combat and more fluid as a whole, also with much darker story and more evil bosses. Of course taste is subjective, it’s a great recommendation none the less.

+1 for Nine Sols. Also the setting of the game which the studio dubbed "Taopunk" for its combination of Taoism and Cyberpunk is very unique artistically. Also it had a very endearing cast of characters. As good as Hollow Knight is, story and character-wise it was very hard to follow for me personally.

Nine Sols was clearly built on top of Hollow Knight, but my take on the combat is a bit different, Hollow Knight and Nine Sols would be like Dark Souls/Elden Ring (HK) and Sekiro (NS), one is focused on fast movement and dodges while the other is more focused on parry and counter attack mechanics.

I enjoyed both games but I found that with the exception of the last boss Nine Sols was a way easier game after you figure out how to parry effectively.

I also enjoyed the whimsical art style of HK a bit more than the (as said in a comment) "taopunk" style of NS, but that's purely subjective.

But if you enjoy metroidvanias both are great games that you should try.

> Nine Sols was a way easier game

For me it was the other way around. In Nine Sols I got immediately stuck in the boss (mini-boss?) fight against two enemies and the flying gal.

Hollow Knight was difficult at times (Coliseum of Fools, Radiance) but it never felt unfair. Some fights (Mantis Lords, Grimm) are among the best times I've had playing a game

I believe the Deltarune release this year also crashed a bunch of storefronts. Kind of interesting to compare the sales from these tiny indie developers vs, say, anything that Microsoft's mega game studios have touched in the last few years.

I think that's mainly down to those mega-huge games usually having preorders, and small indie game usually not, for whatever reason.

Neither Deltarune or Silksong could be preordered so everyone was zerg rushing the stores at the same time.

Especially with the ballooning size of installs, pre-ordering and pre-loading a 100GB+ game could be the difference between playing same day vs the next.

Note how Silksong is a decently small 7-8 Go.

There’s a natural break-even point between the cost of maintaining peak server capacity and the lost revenue of server outages, especially if that peak demand is primarily fixed-quantity for a unique product with a very low chance of giving up. Ticketmaster figured this out decades ago and clearly the major game platforms have learned it as well.

Note to clouders, they could spend on pre-warmed autoscaler pools, but a corporation that spends a single dollar of revenue more than necessary to make the sale is violating its duty to shareholders, and total gross launch revenue will be the same whether they do or not, so they won’t, even though they could.

Note to game developers, for this exact reason you should be demanding launch month bonus targets rather than day or week; any less and you’re being knowingly ripped off by business execs.

Games, as an industry, have a lot of overlap with film. One of those overlaps is that it's still an industry where one person, with the right idea and (depending on the idea) the willingness to invest the ungodly amount of time to see it through, can put something out there that competes with the big teams and big budgets.

Sometimes, the idea hits so hard that you don't even need the time investment. Notch got Minecraft from version alpha to version 1 in 2 years. That one was lightning in a bottle; unlikely to be reproducible consistently.

Is that still true for film? The distribution channels for that industry are so tightly controlled that indie film producers don't see nearly the same levels of success as video games. There's a good handful of new indie game millionaires every year, and I don't think that the same can be said for TV or film.

I'm just wondering why they don't stage the release by releasing it into different timezones at the same hour but not at the same time.

Screws over players and streamers who are in the later zones

Oh right! I was wondering why Steam wasn't loading the store properly. That hasn't happened in a while, has it?

Not since the last Steam sale (and every single Steam sale before it) ... really, Valve need to sort out their creaking server infrastructure for big events and launches. It's not like no-one could have predicted this ...

System infrastructure and outages aside, it's wild the level of simping for a mediocre side scroller in 2025.

Which great side scroller do you simp for?

I agree. This seems so similar to SO many games that were around 40 years ago. It's mario, and a bit of donkey kong. Why are people going nuts over this? I genuinely want to know.

Whats responsible for its secret? looks like an indie platformer game amongst many, many others. I think theres been about 20k games released on steam in 2024. How does it manage to stand out amongst other games?

Not sure, really. Hollow Knight is a nice game, but it didn't blow me away. The atmosphere is very nice, but the main storyline is IMO overwrought and kind of random. The side stories and most characters are also nice. The mechanics are, I guess, above average as well.

I feel similarly. I appear to have put 30 hours into it at this point, but I don't have particularly strong memories of any part of it. It took me several tries to get into it initially. I've always felt like Ori and the Blind Forest (released only two years before Hollow Knight) was a much better game overall, particularly when it came to movement and story execution, yet it comes up far less often in discussions of the genre.

Funny, I'm the opposite; I love Hollow Knight, but I didn't like Ori at all. I think it's because of the visual design; I couldn't tell if that glowing orb is an enemy, a bullet, or a pickup.

Ori is a beautiful game but with so many effects and a tiny character I often found it hard to make out what was going on, the movement is very floaty which lead to combat feeling less tight, and other than a giant owl I don't remember any of the characters now. Hollow Knight's characters and world were a lot more memorable to me.

It's the sequel to an indie darling widely viewed as among the best (or the best) metroidvanias. On top of that, the game has been in development for 6+ years, so long that the release has become a meme. See r/SilkSong. The hype for this is remarkable and people have been counting the hours since it was announced 2 weeks ago.

People trust Team Cherry to deliver a commensurate experience to Hollow Knight, which stands as many peoples' favorite games of all time.

This kind of hype comes rarely, and it's very specific to this specific game.

That development time window, and the fanbase salivating for a sequel, makes me smile.

Nintendo famously spends something like 6-8 years on its flagship titles (both Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Kart World are in that timeframe). Sometimes, depending on the team you're working with and the material you have, it turns out the secret to making a good game is... Time.

>Nintendo famously spends something like 6-8 years on its flagship titles

This is not something Nintendo is famous for. This is just the norm in modern day game development now. It took 3 years for Mario Galaxy to get a sequel back on the Wii.

> The hype for this is remarkable and people have been counting the hours since it was announced 2 weeks ago.

There was a person /u/UrsaRyan on reddit.com/r/civ doing a Sid Meier's Civilization related meme for about two years on daily basis until next (seventh?) installment in the game was released. That one flopped though, so yea, not sure what my point is, guess something about hype for a game on reddit or something and in the end it not paying off.

What makes a meal stand out amongst others made with the same ingredients? Game design is a thing that requires careful balance to produce an engaging and satisfying experience both moment to moment and over course of the whole game. Think how difficult it is to make a truly great movie, only now put the camera in the hands of any random person for it's duration and keep it great.

Many games do well at a few aspects, but few hit it out of the park across the board.

Hollow Knight managed something pretty close to that. It's a creative feat that required not only excellence in storytelling, art, music, and interaction design, asking others, but also excellence in blending then together to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.

The studio that did that is releasing a new game in the same vein and people want more of that established track record of excellence.

From what I've seen on Reddit it seems to have a viral meme aspect to it.

Sure, but the viral meme aspect is because HK was such a well received game and Silksong has been so highly anticipated for so long, not the other way around. It certainly contributes to the hype today, but memes are not the reason for the initial success of Hollow Knight and the anticipation of Silksong. The memes really took off around 2021-2022 after Silksong had been in development for several years with no release in sight and people started wondering how long of a wait they were in for.

I suppose it could be because it's a competent platformer in a world where most games are not.

Lots of things but let's focus on just two.

First you're looking at it wrong: it doesn't really matter how busy the calendar is. I mean just because people say that it does matter how many games or creative products or whatever are released, and just because some of those people are experienced execs, doesn't mean that it's true.

People who buy games aren't thinking, man I don't have time for games. Okay? So you see how the first thing to understand is: this isn't for you. Someone who has to make choices about how to spend their time isn't buying many games at all.

Before Silksong, they validated marketability & audience many times. Hollow Knight was in Ludum Dare, Newgrounds, festival & conference circuit, Kickstarter, multiple stores & formats.

Why was it standing out then? To me, the coherence of the art, and a game format that aligns with the indie art production and audience validation well.

Consider that larger games are arted by art directors and teams of contractors. If your whole team is excellent and you spend a lot of money rejecting art, okay, you will wind up with something coherent. You can also have 1 person make all the art like Hollow Knight & Silksong.

Indie games - and these guys are actually independently published and actually just 3 people and a handful of contractors - have this superpower. Any 1 person can make all the art for their indie game, and some have found great success doing this, like Stardew Valley. Some people give up a year in, or ten years in, or whatever.

So if you have little trickles of validation along the way, then you actually finish your game, which is maybe why this all worked.

And then this game is a sequence of levels, you can finish all the art for one screen and then move onto the next screen. You can finish a walk cycle going forward, and record the character moving forward in a single background, and it looks like a finished game. A 3D Hero Shooter requires a huge amount of work on level and character art before a preview is fully arted.

Eurogamer just published an article on what was so impressive about the original:

https://www.eurogamer.net/whats-so-special-about-the-origina...

For me, the original Hollow Knight wasn't exceptionally innovative or original, but did set an extremely high bar for polish and refinement over similar indie games. I've played a lot of metroid-style games and Hollow Knight has super tight movement, and expansive and thoughtfully interconnected map, simple but addictive combat, great art and design, memorable music, etc. Plenty of other games have some or most of those things, Hollow Knight just executes them at such a consistent level of craftsmanship that it stands out.

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