The long wait plus short wait is over.

Some Hollow Knight players have been waiting over half a decade for this game, so giving two weeks notice prior to launch was quite a shock. Of course this combination has created one of the biggest hype cycles in the history of indie gaming. Probably the biggest by far to be honest. It's hard to imagine a tiny dev team having so much support that it could crash all the Goliath game servers attempting to host it at launch... but here we are. It's happened.

What a pretty looking spike... too bad it's not crypto!

I've never seen comments like this on downdetector.com... lol

It's funny how rabid the mob can be over something as trivial as a video game. Personally I thought this was a great time to chill out and write this post about how everyone else is very much not chill. Very meta.

It's definitely a good sign that this isn't a dead-stop traffic jam and some people are getting through to the download stage. I've seen a number of gamers on Discord who are frustrated with the ordeal and demand that platforms like Steam should have "known better" and been "more prepared". On the surface from the end-user perspective this sounds like a reasonable expectation, but the reality of the situation is far more complicated.

Bottlenecks everywhere

The end user will often oversimplify the situation because they are projecting their own front-end experience onto the backend. After all, the frontend experience is painstakingly designed to be as smooth and seamless as possible. There isn't a magic lever that can be pushed to increase bandwidth across the board. Anyone who's played a factory game like Factorio or Satisfactory would know that if you want to increase output of the end product you have to fix a dozen bottlenecks along the way or sometimes completely rebuild the assembly line entirely to accommodate higher throughput.

Scaled up services and games like Steam and World of Warcraft have specialized servers that provide a very specific function. It doesn't matter if the game servers are running on overdrive if the login servers go down: if you can't login you can't play. Same story with the download servers: if you can't download the game you can't play the game. Same story with the payment processors.

The bottleneck seems to be mostly payment processors

Steam very well have been fully prepared for this event but there's actually a possibility this is a banking problem. The cart is absolutely overloaded with requests that can't be handled right now. Certainly this issue is exacerbated by Team Cherry is only charging $20 for the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxvkl7kXcVE&ab_channel=YongYea

$20? Really?

It seems to be the consensus that pretty much everyone would have been willing to pay $30 for the game without any complaint. That's a massive 50% markup from where it's at right now. Of course part of the viral success of the original Hollow Knight was a low paywall to allow a lot more people to buy, experience, and shill it to their friends. Personally I've already purchased 3 copies of Hollow Knight so the goal here is to get the biggest audience possible. Team Cherry seem to be real ones and aren't really in this to 100% maximize on profits. If you love what you do the money will come, I suppose.

Shocking!

Luckily I'm not fiending for this game enough to try and troubleshoot a problem that's going to solve itself simply by waiting a few hours. The concept that Steam "should have known" is a bit silly. They did know, and they couldn't do much about it. Would you spend the money to build a 12 lane superhighway because every once and a while there's a traffic jam? Of course not.

Although it is interesting to speculate on if opening day hype events could be solved in the future somehow. Perhaps renting cloud computing on the big day could clam some of the traffic. Of course saying something like that and building it are two completely different things.

And of course it doesn't help that all these Silksong degenerates are in the client clicking the buttons over and over and over again hoping to get a different result like the absolute psychos they are. Steam is basically getting DDoS attacked by their own fanbase. Tragedy of the commons: this is why we can't have nice things. And also... if you were a blackhat hacker looking to attack Steam, obviously right now would be the time to do it, so it's possible they are dealing with that nonsense right now as well. Who knows.

Conclusion

Overhyped game launches have a long history of crashing servers on the big day, and there's not a lot that can be done about it. Traffic jams happen, and the solution to traffic jams isn't to build a bigger road, but rather to incentivize people to not all access a shared resource at the same time. How this would be accomplished for a mob of rabid gamers foaming at the mouth at launch day is well above my paygrade.