5 things you didn't know about Hollow Knight: Silksong
Publikováno: 12.9.2025
Also: this week's big Steam debuts, and lots of news.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
We’re sorry, we’re not immune to talking about big games at GDCo. But since - as multiple LinkedIn unfluencers have been yelling - ‘make an acclaimed Metroidvania in 2017 and then go radio silent for most of the next decade, before releasing a banger’ is not a tactic that most of us can try, we’ve got a different angle for today’s Silksong lead.
And before we start: yes, somebody hacked the villagers in Animal Crossing on the Gamecube to talk to you using an LLM. And yes, after the ‘vibecoder’ in question gave Nintendo’s adorable animals “a tiny shared memory for gossip”, the chatter ended up “escalating into an anti-Tom Nook movement.” Is this… the future we deserve?
[LIKE WHAT WE DO HERE? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro!) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]
Game discovery news: why games take longer to make…
As we round out the week, plenty of game discovery and platform news to jam on here, so let’s jam on it:
Footprints.gg’s latest weekly ‘trad media’ game mentions chart sees Silksong outpacing other titles by 3x, followed by Bond game 007: First Light getting pre-orders & hype, as well as Cronos: The New Dawn (just released!), Borderlands 4 (released after the end of this period), and more…
This morning’s Nintendo Direct was decent (press release), announcing a new Fire Emblem game, a Super Mario Galaxy 1&2 remaster, plus new Yoshi & Mario Tennis games, a Pokemon farming / life sim, and some higher-end Switch 2 games: Hades 2, Resident Evil 9 (& some prequels), Metroid Prime 4 for Switch 1&2 on Dec. 4th, and more. (No game-changers, but plenty of goodness.)
‘What is the real reason some games are taking longer to make?’ is a good Q asked by GameDeveloper.com. One of many answers: the move towards graphical complexity on the AAA side: “just because [new dev and art] tools made photorealism ‘feasible’, didn't mean it made them easy to use.”
There’s been a lot of talk about YouTube views being down, even for game videos, and many - like gaming YouTuber Wanderbot - think Restricted Mode is part of the problem. (The feature’s bad, but we’re not so sure, since it’s been around a long time & isn’t on for most. Maybe bot blocking or changed algo/metrics?)
The Verge’s Tom Warren is noting that Xbox Cloud Gaming is - surprisingly - technically quite far behind Nvidia’s GeForce Now tiers in terms of quality & tech. But: “A number of players have spotted a new 1440p mode in recent weeks”, and it’s also getting new HQ mode for 720p and 1080p.
Steam rolled out a host of Beta features into the full PC game client, including adding a Customization tab to individual games so you can “view and set custom artwork for the game and set a custom sort title” in your library - neat. Also re: discovery: "Store menu - Top Genres should now be more relevant and dynamic."
Gov news: Mexico is proposing an 8% tax on “digital services offering violent video games”in its 2026 budget, and U.S. health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referenced video games in a discussion on the rise of mass shootings. (With the Kirk shooter also game meme-ing, will Senate hearings be far away?)
Square Enix has invested in Nuuvem to help fund the upcoming Spawnd, described as “a web gaming platform that allows premium game demos to be played, shared, and embedded anywhere on the web, just like a YouTube video”, which will include direct CTA to the Steam page. (We presume cloud gaming is involved.)
The folks from IndieBI brought a bunch of ‘optimizing your indie game success’ graphs to a Unity blog, and there’s good discussion on pricing: “underpricing a highly in-demand game from $24.99 to $19.99 might make you feel more comfortable, but it could also be silently erasing 20% of your launch revenue and initial visibility.”
We were enlightened by this summary of China’s ISBN review standards (for getting your game officially gov-approved there, tho ‘Steam global’ titles don’t need to do it!) One no-no: “Content that promotes cults, superstitious beliefs, or occult practices. This includes game mechanics like fortune-telling that are presented as real.”
New outfit HushCrasher did some interesting research using “length and diversity of the [game] credits, disk usage, number of available languages” and more to classify all Steam games by ‘Kei, Midi, AA, AAA’ scope categories. (It’s very non-perfect, but also a great attempt to use data to categorize the semi-uncategorizable…)
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus Game Catalog titles for September include WWE 2K25, Persona 5 Tactica, Green Hell & more; Nazara has licensed popular Steam FPS Bodycam for a Fortnite ‘island’; Sony’s launching the PlayStation Family mobile app to manage kid playtime, spending limits, and all that goodness.
8 things you didn’t know about Hollow Knight: Silksong…
So, with 2D Metroidvania sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong already having ~6 million players, by GDCo’s estimates - >3.2 million copies on Steam and 500k+ each on PlayStation and Switch 1/2, as well as ~1.5 million downloads on Xbox Game Pass, it’s one of the biggest small-team hits of the year so far. (Numbers will only improve!)
So it’s exceptional, sure. And executed pretty much flawlessly, except the Chinese localization issues we mentioned before, which the team are addressing. And, while we don’t have a ‘here’s how you can do this too!’ post about Silksong (since you can’t!) we do have a bunch of interesting data. Which we’ll be spooling out in list form, now…
#1 - Silksong outperformed other ‘Metroidvanias’ in 2025 - by a lot.
If we look at all Steam games with ‘Metroidvania’ in the Top 8 tags, released this year, Silksong’s dominance is striking. Heck, some of the top games here like Supraworld (3D first-person) and Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance (more action-platformer) aren’t even core 2D Metroidvanias.
And those that are, like BLADECHIMERA, have sold 1% of Silksong. This is more top-heavy than tags like Open World Survival Craft, which at least has 7 ‘new in 2025’ titles grossing >$1m using the same criteria. (Although only two, RuneScape: Dragonwilds & Dune: Awakening, grossed >$5m - both by a lot.)
#2 - Silksong has a diverse country base, if similar to OG Hollow Knight
Looking at ‘Steam players by country’ of the 2017 original vs. the 2025 follow-up, the country make-up is overall varied, but remarkably similar between titles, and in a very similar ranking order.
For the record, the top ten countries for Silksong are: “#1 - China (23.3%), #2 United States (18.4%), #3 Russia(n Federation) (6.4%), #4 Brazil (5.1%), #5 United Kingdom (3.4%), #6 Canada (3.2%), #7 France (2.65%), #8 Spain (2.6%), #9 Germany (2.5%), #10 Argentina (2.2%).”
On console, PlayStation is led by the U.S. at 25%, and then China/HK at 12%, Brazil at 10.5% (an overperform!), and Saudi Arabia at 5%. And on Xbox Game Pass, it’s 28% U.S., 14% Brazil, 13% Mexico, and 6% Argentina. (South America loves Silksong?)
#3 - The player countries are similar because… the players are so similar!
Using our GameDiscoverCo Pro data site (which provides all the data in this analysis), we looked specifically at the ‘highest overlap’ games played by Hollow Knight: Silksong that had >10x Affinity (i.e. were >10 times more likely to have been played by Silksong players than the average Steam player.)
The headline from this: the overlap with OG Hollow Knight players is a whopping 79%. (And we have Hollow Knight itself as 11.4 million copies sold on Steam, with an $8 average price.) This means that 22% of all Hollow Knight Steam players have already bought the sequel.
That 79% player overlap is high. (53% of Kingdom Come II: Deliverance players own the original.) However, it’s not that high, and when franchises get big enough, overlap really gets that big - Elden Ring Nightreign has an 81% overlap with OG Elden Ring players on Steam, and Borderlands 4 has a 78% overlap with Borderlands 2 players.
[We didn’t get a chance to talk about the other high Affinity games in here, but most are unsurprising - Celeste, Ori & The Blind Forest, Ender Lilies, Salt & Sanctuary, and the VERY Hollow Knight-y Nine Sols. Some are more unorthodox, like - Ultrakill and Lies Of P, tho.]
#3 - Review sentiment shows how excited people were to finally play…
We know people have been waiting for this game for a long time - and our ‘word cloud from common words in positive, helpfully rated Steam reviews’ for Silksong (above) is littered with things like ‘finally’, ‘wait’, ‘years’, and ‘happy’ (aww!)
There’s way less on the negative side (not shown), with ‘bosses’ and ‘enemies’ as negative keywords,pointing too the game being a tad hard. That’s something Team Cherry is already addressing quietly via nerf patches.
#5 - Players don’t have the OG’s playtime on Silksong yet - but just wait
The ‘hours played’ curve for games like Silksong will change significantly over time. Just after release, players haven’t had a chance to play for a hundred plus hours. And later on, more casual players will flood in when the game is discounted.
But for now, we can still compare the Steam play time of the OG Hollow Knight to its sequel, and discover that surprisingly, median play time isn’t that different right now. (Hollow Knight: 11 hours and 51 minutes, and Silksong: 9 hours and 15 minutes.)
And that’s our data review so far. Our biggest takeaway? Think of Silksong’s success more as a ‘rabid 20-30 million person fanbase gets to enjoy a long-awaited sequel’ than a success that can be analyzed in context with most new releases…
This week on Steam: Borderlands 4, Shape Of Dreams win…
Finally, for our GDCo Pro & Plus subscribers, let’s take a look at the big debuts of the week on Steam. And yes, that game on the right a) exists, and b) has a cute doggo in it.