Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally out, and Team Cherry's long-awaited Metroidvania action-platformer has instantly become the hottest game on Twitch.
Hordes of viewers had already piled into the Silksong Twitch category before the game's official release time, and Steam and Switch eShop outages pushed that back a smidge for many users since Team Cherry didn't offer any sort of pre-load, driving countless people into the same storage pages all at once.
Within minutes of its launch, Silksong was on top of Twitch. At the time of writing, there are 349,000 viewers in the category, placing Silksong ahead of runner-up Dota 2, which has 339,000 viewers. The "Just Chatting" category ranks third with 266,000 viewers, while GTA 5 and League of Legends complete the top five.
I've been monitoring the category throughout the morning, and for a while, every time I refreshed the page, the Silksong viewer count would go up. The highest peak I saw was 363,000 viewers.
It's not unusual for new games to rise to the top of Twitch, but it is extremely rare for new indie games, let alone single-player games that lack the innate communal appeal of viral hits like multiplayer climbing sim Peak, to draw viewership like this. Silksong has become the game of the moment, drawing players, streamers, and viewers who might not care about most Metroidvanias.
Silksong isn't just any ol' Metroidvania, of course. It's the sequel to what we and many call the best Metroidvania game of all time, and it's got years of build-up and anticipation propelling it along.
Even so, it's wondrous to see a single-player 2D indie game almost immediately steal the Twitch throne. It inevitably won't hold it for long, as the launch rush calms down and the normal evergreen live service games keep doing their thing, but it's another gem in Team Cherry's crown.
