It’s Silksong release day! Actually, at time of writing, it’s literally Silksong release minute, and the sheer unbridled hype of the whole situation has, um, brought Steam to a crashing halt. Whoops!
As I type these very words, attempting to access the Steam store results in an E502 L3 error message and a bashful “Something went wrong.” I know what went wrong, Steam, everyone clicked the Silksong button at the same time!
With 36,000,000 users online, Steamstat.us currently lists the Steam store as operating at a “Very slow” capacity, occasionally ticking over to a concerned, yellow “Bad gateway” message.
It is worth mentioning, of course, that Hollow Knight: Silksong was never up for pre-order. Anyone who wanted day-one access to the game had to turn up at 15:00 GMT on the dot and buy the dang thing. Would allowing pre-orders, rather than forcing the game’s incredibly thirsty fans and legions of curious onlookers to all show up at once, have ameliorated this situation? Probably a bit. But it would have been much less funny.
Social media is awash with Steam users rather shocked and/or miffed by the whole thing. “Skong crashed steam😔,” writes one. “STEAM FIX YOURSELF PLEASE IM TRYING TO BUY SILKSONG,” writes another. “VAI SE FODER STEAM,” writes one user in what I can only assume is an expression of anguish.
Not to worry, folks. Steam seems—just about—to be whirring back to life as Gabe Newell presumably takes one of his many knives to the servers. But I guess we’ve learned at least one thing: all those devs who delayed their games to escape the Silksong asteroid strike were probably absolutely right to do so. If nothing else, they wouldn’t have been able to sell their games on a crashed store page.
