The weekend after launch is often when games hit their all-time peak Steam concurrents (at least until a big sale or special update), and Borderlands 4 managed to hit 304,398 on Sunday, according to SteamDB’s record keeping.
It’s an impressive achievement for Gearbox’s $70 co-op shooter, but if it puts Borderlands 4 somewhere in the stratosphere, then Hollow Knight: Silksong must be mingling with the aurora borealis, having hit 587,150 concurrent Steam players on the Saturday after it launched.
Those numbers put Borderlands 4 at #46 on the list of all-time highest Steam concurrent peaks, just below Elden Ring Nightreign, and Silksong all the way up at #17, sandwiched between Apex Legends and Path of Exile 2.
I don’t like to fixate too much on Steam concurrents as a measure of popularity, as they don’t tell the whole story, but they are one of few direct windows into what gamers are doing that we have, and this particular figure underlines just how colossal of a success Silksong has been.
The rest of the story in this case includes the detail that Silksong is much cheaper than Borderlands 4—$20 vs $70—which helps explain why it was able to attract a greater number of Steam players (and why Borderlands 4 is the one at the top of Steam’s best sellers chart, which is based on revenue). Silksong is also a game that should run on just about anything, including a Steam Deck, whereas Borderlands 4 has fairly demanding minimum specs and launched with frame rate and stuttering problems.
On the flip side, though, Silksong is available on Game Pass, while Borderlands 4 isn’t. Last we heard, Game Pass has more than 35 million subscribers. That’s 35 million people who can play Silksong without buying it on Steam, and the subscription service has in the past been blamed for limiting the retail success of games on it. Yet industry analyst GameDiscoverCo estimates that the 2D action platformer has sold 3.2 million copies on the platform so far.
Part of me thought that all those years of memey pining for Silksong—flooding the comments in every gaming showcase with demands for a trailer—were just a passionate but moderately-sized fanbase having some fun. It turns out there really was a Silksong army.
Looking down on a behemoth like Borderlands from any vantage point is quite an achievement for an indie series. The first Hollow Knight saw 15 million copies sold, according to a recent Bloomberg report, which is obviously nothing to sneeze at, but 94 million copies of Borderlands games had been sold prior to Borderlands 4, according to Take-Two Interactive.
And the Hollow Knight fans were right to anticipate Silksong: We awarded the tough-as-nails indie metroidvania a 90% in our review.
We don’t yet have a review of Borderlands 4, but it’s on the way, and critics who received advanced copies have mostly liked it. In the meantime, we do have lots of Borderlands 4 guides to offer. (Don’t tell the cool kids with their bug game, but Borderlands 4 is more my thing, so that’s where my personal contribution to these numbers lies.)
