Analysts Estimate Hollow Knight: Silksong Has Sold Over 4.2 Million Copies

It's been almost two weeks since the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, and with the game's gargantuan hype beginning to slowly dissipate, industry experts and gaming enthusiasts alike are now hard at work analyzing the most-anticipated indie game's release, putting numbers to just how successful its debut has been.

Assisting the community in this task are analysts from the GameDiscoverCo team, who recently published their estimates on how many copies the game has sold, along with other key data that frames Silksong's success against both the original Hollow Knight and other metroidvania titles released in 2025.

According to their estimates, in less than two weeks since launch, Hollow Knight: Silksong has sold over 4.2 million copies – 3.2 million on Steam and more than 500,000 each on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 1/2. Factoring in Xbox sales and roughly 1.5 million estimated downloads via Xbox Game Pass, analysts put the total player count at around 6 million.

With Steam appearing to be the game's strongest market, analysts compared its performance there to other 2025 metroidvanias, and unsurprisingly, Silksong surpassed all competitors by a huge margin. As per their findings, the year's second-best-selling title, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, has only about 46,700 Steam sales, roughly 1.5% of Silksong's total, and a gross revenue of $1.09 million, a little over 2% of Silksong's $52.4 million on Steam alone.

The analysts have also compared the sequel's playtime to that of the original Hollow Knight, showing that the sequel's average time played is currently 2.5 times lower than that of the original – for obvious reasons, there haven't yet been that many players with 50+ hours in the game. The median playtime, on the other hand, is much closer: 11 hours and 51 minutes for the original and 9 hours and 15 minutes for the sequel, a number that could also rise as more players spend time with the game.

In the end, GameDiscoverCo pointed out that while Hollow Knight: Silksong's launch performance is remarkable, it offers little in the way of lessons for other developers. The sequel's legendary status, supported by its massive pre-existing fanbase and its long, highly anticipated development, was the main driver of hype, and there's little other devs can do to recreate this magic (aside from also making an iconic game and then spending nearly a decade working on its sequel with minimal updates – possible, but hardly a reliable business strategy).

Speaking of Silksong, last week, Twitter user sammwy demonstrated that, technically speaking, the new Hollow Knight installment isn't actually 2D but rather a 3D game with multiple layers arranged along a real Z-axis to achieve a parallax effect. You can learn more about sammwy's findings and the software they used to make them by clicking this link.

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