Lead: On Sept. 4, 2025, when Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight: Silksong went on sale after a six-year wait, players rushed to buy it on Steam, Nintendo eShop and the Xbox Store, and many users reported outages across those storefronts.
Key Takeaways
- Hollow Knight: Silksong became available for purchase on Sept. 4, 2025 after a six-year development period.
- Players reported access problems on Steam, Nintendo eShop and Xbox Store almost immediately after release.
- DownDetector and social posts showed a sharp spike in outage reports coinciding with the launch.
- No public, detailed statements from Steam, Nintendo or Microsoft had been posted at time of reporting.
- The outages appear linked to heavy demand, but technical causes are not yet confirmed.
Verified Facts
Team Cherry released Hollow Knight: Silksong for sale on Sept. 4, 2025. The title has been highly anticipated since its announcement, and many players attempted to purchase or download the game as soon as it went live.
Third-party monitoring service DownDetector registered a substantial increase in reports for the Steam store and other platforms around the same time Silksong became purchasable. Social media users also posted screenshots and messages describing failed purchases, stalled downloads and storefront errors.
Reports came from multiple regions, with users citing trouble completing transactions or accessing store pages on Nintendo’s eShop, Valve’s Steam storefront, and Microsoft’s Xbox Store. The volume of reports rose sharply within minutes of the release announcement.
At the time of this report, no comprehensive technical explanation had been published by the platform operators. Journalists and observers reached out to Steam and platform teams for comment; responses were pending.
Context & Impact
Silksong is one of the most anticipated indie releases of recent years. High-profile indie launches can generate intense short-term traffic as players attempt to buy and download simultaneously, which sometimes strains storefront systems or related infrastructure.
For players, the immediate impact was frustration: delayed downloads, interrupted purchases and the need to retry. For the platforms and developer, outages during a launch can slow initial sales momentum and prompt customer-support surges.
From a business perspective, a rapid influx of concurrent buyers can highlight capacity limits in payment processing, content delivery networks, or storefront backends. Platforms typically scale for expected load, but exceptionally large spikes can expose gaps.
Official Statements
No full public statement had been posted by the storefront operators at the time of reporting; platform teams were contacted for comment.
Steam / Nintendo / Microsoft (platforms)
Unconfirmed
- Whether the outages were caused solely by purchase traffic vs. unrelated server or network failures is not confirmed.
- Exact numbers for failed transactions or the total number of affected users have not been released.
Bottom Line
Hollow Knight: Silksong’s long-awaited launch generated such intense demand that many players experienced access problems on multiple digital stores. While monitoring services and social posts show a clear spike in reports, official technical details from the platforms were not available at publication. Readers should check the Steam, Nintendo and Xbox status pages for updates as the situation develops.