Hollow Knight: Silksong has just launched. Silksong’s release time was about 30 minutes ago (at the time of writing), and it looks like the hype of Team Cherry’s long-awaited sequel was too much for most game marketplaces. We’ve seen reports of multiple storefronts experiencing outages, including the number one spot for PC gamers, Steam. You might run into the E502 L3 error on Steam.

Silksong also releases on GeForce Now today. You might have better luck there, assuming you could grab your copy of Silksong and add it to your Steam library in time – unusually, the game wasn’t available for pre-order, perhaps to try and prevent some kind of datamining. In any case, you might have to give Valve some time to recover before you can jump in.

Hollow Knight: Silksong launch causes Steam server outages

The game launched at 7 AM PDT / 3 PM UK time. As you can see from the graph below, a massive spike in Steam outage reports came shortly after the release. You’ll see plenty of people in the comments section blaming it on Silksong, though it’s not inherently Team Cherry’s fault; “Silksong is good it broke Steam,” one person adds.

You can keep a close eye on the Steam server status over on steamstat.us. Immediately after launch, we noticed the Steam Store was reported as running very slowly. Right now, the storefront has been updated to ‘Recovered’ status, so it shouldn’t take too long for Silksong fans to get into the game.

Although there was no pre-order or chance to pre-load, you’ll be happy to hear that the game only asks for 8GB of storage space, so you shouldn’t lose too much time downloading it. Hollow Knight: Silksong is available on Steam for $19.99 / £16.75.

We can only imagine the kind of server issues Steam might suffer once GTA 6 comes out.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.