Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo

Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by jijikuya on Thursday September 04, 2025 @01:29PM (#45129836)

1. That's Valve's prerogative, not the developer's. If they're not partnered with Valve they may not have had the option to enact pre-purchases. [1]

2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.

[1]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/prepurchase

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Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by brandon on Thursday September 04, 2025 @02:25PM (#45130528)

You don't believe Team Cherry's prior sales of Hollow Knight would reach the bar noted in the docs you linked?

Aside, your second point is incorrect. The SteamDB folks have a public write up on analysis of the preload system: https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-download-system/

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Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by NobodyNada on Thursday September 04, 2025 @01:44PM (#45130015)

#2 seems like a technically solvable problem: AES-encrypt the preload and distribute the key on launch day.

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Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by 0cf8612b2e1e on Thursday September 04, 2025 @02:07PM (#45130278)

I thought they already did something like this. I recall some people complaining because the naive decryption process would double the required hard drive space while the bundle was unpacking on release day.

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Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by jandrese on Thursday September 04, 2025 @02:31PM (#45130596)

There is no need for the decryption to double the needed size. You can chunk it to something reasonable and effectively rewrite the file in place.

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Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by Hamuko on Thursday September 04, 2025 @04:21PM (#45131805)

Pretty sure they already do it. I've also noticed that if you have a fast connection (like 1 Gb/s down), it might be faster to download the game when it releases than it is to preload it and then decrypt it, since the decryption process is quite slow.

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Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by semiquaver on Thursday September 04, 2025 @07:32PM (#45133426)

Of course they do. GGP has no idea what they are talking about.

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Re:Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Stea... by rbits on Sunday September 07, 2025 @12:34AM (#45155425)

They could've enabled pre-orders on Nintendo and Xbox

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