Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally here, and when it dropped on September 4, it promptly brought digital storefronts across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo to their knees. As these platforms buckled under the weight of millions of fans, many started assuming that if Silksong could crash these stores, a game like Grand Theft Auto 6 might crucify them.
Silksong accrued more than half a million players on Steam alone within hours of release, causing the platform to drop as all these fans kicked off their downloads at the same time, and that’s just one example. What can be done to ensure that GTA 6 doesn’t decimate the global internet infrastructure when it releases next May?
What Happened with Hollow Knight: Silksong?
Hollow Knight: Silksong proved to be an instant smash hit for Team Cherry, with the game skyrocketing up the charts within minutes of being released globally. On Twitch, it exceeded 300,000 viewers before it had even been released, and the demand for the game was so intense that the Game Pass verification servers were knocked offline.
In many ways, it was an infrastructure stress test, and by some measure, it was a success. It exposed a critical vulnerability in the increasingly digital world of gaming that could be crippled entirely when a title like Grand Theft Auto 6 is released.
Silksong was released with no pre-order build-up, one trailer, and almost no time between the release date announcement and the go-live date coming around. By contrast, GTA 6 has had one of the most record-breaking marketing loops we’ve ever seen, and it dominates every conversation about the future of gaming.
Are we on a precipice?
What Platform Providers Must Do to Prepare
Silksong wasn’t even an exceptional circumstance; we’ve seen this kind of thing occur with many major launches in recent history.
For instance, when Fallout 76 was released in 2018, the first-time-online title from Bethesda offered rampant server instability. World of Warcraft: Classic dropped in 2019, and unexpected server load led to queues of tens of thousands of gamers. When Blizzard pivoted Overwatch 2 to a free-to-play model in 2022, it came with severe server overload issues.
Every time Escape from Tarkov has a wipe (read: new season), the servers go haywire and queues crop up all over the place. When Final Fantasy VIX: Endwalker came out in 2021, queues became so sizeable that Square Enix had to temporarily halt sales.
These are the risks we face, and it can be argued that these games won’t be a patch on Grand Theft Auto 6.
What can providers do to prepare for the May 2026 release of GTA 6?
- Allowing pre-loads and staggered access windows can flatten the curve on launch day and prevent swarming
- Invest in cloud-based elastic servers to cope with scaling up and down over a launch window
- Have a failover redundancy system for servers that allows for a seamless takeover
- Offer better communications on social media and status sites when an incident is taking place
Hollow Knight: Silksong was a glimpse of what happens when the most highly anticipated games leap face-first into a very eager market all at once. There are concerns that GTA 6 could take what Silksong did and replicate it tenfold, threatening the stability of digital platforms everywhere next year.
For the average user, nothing can be done but wait and see if Rockstar Games, Take-Two, and those who oversee the global network infrastructure have done enough to prepare for the GTA 6 release.
Are you anticipating widespread issues when GTA 6 is released next year? Let me know on the Insider Gaming forum.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Wolverine should be at the next State of Play
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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