Silksong Buries Borderlands
The gaming press is buzzing this week over a shocking upset. On its launch weekend, Gearbox’s Borderlands 4 reached a peak of just over 304,000 concurrent players on Steam.
Now, that’s a respectable figure by any measure; enough to land it at #46 on the all-time charts.
But the real story lies in what happened just one slot above.
Team Cherry’s long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong obliterated all expectations. On the same weekend the fourth entry in a long-running franchise big enough to spawn a Hollywood movie got 300K players, the $20 indie title logged 587,000 concurrent players; nearly double Borderlands 4.
That makes Silksong the 17th highest concurrent player peak in Steam history, rubbing shoulders with Apex Legends and Path of Exile 2.
In other words, a small team of Australians just humiliated one of the most bankable AAA franchises of the past decade.
Related: Hollow Knight Silksong - Another Indie Trumph
The excuses from the usual suspects are already pouring in. Borderlands 4 costs $70, while Silksong is only $20. Silksong runs smoothly on any hardware from a high-end rig to a Steam Deck, while Borderlands 4 stumbled out of the gate with stutters and framerate issues. Silksong is on Game Pass, supposedly diluting its direct sales potential.
And yet, despite every one of those supposed disadvantages, Silksong has sold an estimated 3.2 million copies on Steam alone in less than two weeks.
The Borderlands franchise, which has moved 94 million units across its lifetime, just got upstaged by the “silly bug game” the corporate tastemakers brushed off for years.
What explains the upset?
For eight years, gamers memed “Where’s Silksong?” under every showcase and trailer drop. Games journalists mocked their persistence, assuming it was just a handful of diehards.
But when the dam broke, gamers’ pent-up demand for authentic entertainment drowned out the journos’ jeering.
That massive demand has nothing to do with ten-figure advertising campaigns, multimedia tie-ins, or social media astroturf. AAA shills just got an up-close-and-personal look at what happens when Genuine craft meets real hunger.
Team Cherry took their time. They delivered a game with clear design principles, a coherent vision, and gameplay that doesn’t treat the audience like dopamine-addicted cattle. Meanwhile, AAA dev houses like Gearbox keep mistaking budget projections for player interest. They crank up production values, slap a $70 price tag on the box, and assume the audience will show up.
Increasingly, their assumptions are wrong.
Related: Vampire Survivors Proves Authentic Creators Can Replace AAA Publishers
Some dismiss Silksong’s victory over Borderlands 4 as a blip on the SteamDB charts. But that’s pure cope. Racking up those kinds of numbers against these kinds of odds proves this underdog win is another crack in the Pop Cult’s facade. The quasi-religion whose first commandment is to endlessly consume reheated IP from the late 20th century is fading with the era it enshrines as its Eden.
Borderlands 4 should have been bulletproof. it had the absolute advantages of a long-established series, the marketing muscle of an industry giant, and decades of sales data.
Instead, it got trampled by a bug-themed Metroidvania whose greatest promotional tool was years of jokes from gamers grown tired of waiting.
AAA devs would do well to get the message: Authentic art grounded in genuine creative vision is worth more than a thousand billboards and influencer bribes.
Creators of every stripe should take note: Silksong proves you don’t need Hollywood backing, a marketing war chest, or decades of corporate hype to break through.
You need to:
Know your craft and pursue mastery
Respect your audience by giving them works of substance, not pandering
Stay the course instead of chasing the puck of every industry trend.
Do that, and you may just find yourself slaying giants.
It turns out the Silksong meme was a prophecy.
And it just came true.
For action-adventure that blends Gundam and Xenogears in one thrilling package, read my military SF epic Combat Frame XSeed!
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.