Silksong demand prompts Steam and game store crash

The biggest online video game stores crashed on Thursday as they struggled to deal with high demand for Hollow Knight: Silksong – one of the most-anticipated games of the year.

Thousands of users reported they were unable to buy the game on PC store Steam after its release at 15:00 BST, with errors persisting until around 17:30.

Social media users also shared their difficulties trying to purchase Silksong on other platforms, including the Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox game stores.

Fans of Hollow Knight have been eagerly awaiting the sequel after the first game’s release in 2017, which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide according to the developer.

User reports on outage-checker Downdetector rose sharply on release, peaking at 3,750 before falling gradually over the following hour.

It led some angry fans to criticise the platform, with one calling the outage “ridiculous” and others saying it was “stupid” there was no option to pre-order the game, which they said would have avoided the issues altogether.

And further frustrated fans posted screenshots to social media platforms including X (formerly Twitter) of error codes across game stores as they tried to complete their purchase.

Meanwhile, Humble Bundle, another digital storefront, briefly told visitors in a note on its site on Thursday the game was no longer available during the high demand – which has since been resolved.

It led Christopher Larkin, a composer who worked on Hollow Knight and its sequel, to joke on X the game may have “crashed the internet“.

Meanwhile another X user, @haydenschiff, posted an image showing several gamers encountering Steam error codes while trying to share their gameplay on Twitch:

Despite many reporting they were unable to buy the game hours after it went live, the game’s demand was so significant Steam recorded more than 100,000 people were playing it within half an hour of its launch – likely buying their copies from other online stores.

“How you guys play [when] I can’t even buy,” one gamer lamented in a discussion board on the platform.

Meanwhile another X user joked they had “beat the hardest boss” – accompanied by an image showing their purchase of the Hollow Knight sequel had gone through.

And it was not just limited to fans – at least one video game publisher suggested they were also caught up in the chaos caused by demand for the game.