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On September 4, 2025, the gaming industry witnessed an extraordinary event with the release of the long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong. Within hours of its release, millions of downloads poured in on various platforms, causing some digital stores to collapse or slow down significantly.
On Steam alone, the number of active players exceeded half a million in just a few hours. On Twitch, the number of viewers exceeded 300,000 before the game was even officially released. The pressure was so great that the Game Pass verification servers temporarily crashed.
These staggering numbers reveal that Silksong wasn’t just a successful launch, but a true experiment to test the capacity of modern gaming’s digital infrastructure.
If an indie game like Silksong has caused so much stress, what will happen when GTA 6 launches in May 2026? The game, which has generated unprecedented buzz since its announcement and is at the center of every discussion in the gaming world, may be the biggest test in the history of digital platforms.
This isn’t the first time there’s been a major game launch meltdown:
- Fallout 76 (2018): Stability issues from day one.
- WoW Classic (2019): Queues of tens of thousands of players.
- Overwatch 2 (2022): Server collapse with the switch to a free-to-play model.
- FFXIV: Endwalker (2021): Extreme overcrowding forces Square Enix to pause sales.
- Escape from Tarkov Every new “Wipe” repeats the same mess.
How can disaster be avoided with GTA 6? In order for platforms to accommodate this volume of players, there are necessary steps:
- Enable pre-loading and split access time windows.
- Invest in flexible cloud servers that can be scaled up or down as needed.
- Backup systems to ensure service continuity.
- Greater transparency in communication via social media and server status sites.
What happened with Silksong was just a glimpse into the future. If not properly prepared, the launch of GTA 6 could cause an unprecedented global digital crisis.
