Silksong’s Release Brings Steam To Its Knees

It seemed almost inevitable, yet the impact of the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong still took everyone by surprise. The launch of Team Cherry’s much-anticipated sequel to Hollow Knight brought the mighty Steam platform to a complete standstill, taking large sections of it completely offline.nWhen the game dropped earlier today, fans swarmed in their thousands, resulting in countless loading screens frozen in time. It proved impossible to access the checkout, peruse the store or generally use much of the platform’s services.nInevitable frustrations mounted for users unable to sign in, caught in the infinite loop of ‘loading user data’. The ‘Most Played’ chart refused to load, but data revealed an astonishing 101,828 people playing the game almost immediately after its release.nThose hoping to join the cyber onslaught against Steam’s servers were met with the ominous: “Error Code: 2811-7429. Couldn’t connect to the server. The network may be busy, or there may be a problem with the server. Please try again later.” The reports of a full-blown Steam outage quickly tallied up in the thousands. At the time of writing, an official response from Valve remains outstanding.nWhile Silksong is also available on GOG, their substantially smaller user base also seem to be experiencing similar issues.nSteam has had Silksong at the top of its wishlist for a while now, so one cannot help but question Valve’s preparedness for this event. Clear signs pointing to the game’s immense popularity potentially should have prompted the company to ramp up their server capacity, but it looks like the frenzy still managed to take them by surprise.nWhile the disappointed Silksong fans might not see it as such, the brief wait until demand settles could just be considered a minor bump in the road. After all, the entire field of Steam was noticeably unprepared to take the weight of this heavy hitter. One can only wish luck to gamers trying to initiate their downloads in the face of this temporal debacle.