Silksong Finally Arrives, Immediately Murders Steam With Its Bare Hands

At precisely 4 PM CEST, the seven-year vigil ended. At 4:01 PM, the Steam store died a horrible, predictable death.

After years of radio silence and enough memes to fill a museum, Team Cherry actually did it. Hollow Knight: Silksong unlocked on the Steam store at the exact moment they promised.

What followed was the digital equivalent of a black hole forming as the entire gaming population of planet Earth tried to cram through a single digital doorway at once. I was there, frantically refreshing the page. One second, the store was live. The next? Utter annihilation.

The result was instantaneous server Armageddon. The store is gone. Vanished. Replaced by a cold, uncaring error message.

A Victim of Its Own Hype

We should have seen this coming. This is what happens when you spend years cultivating one of the most desperately anticipated sequels of all time. Silksong became the most wish-listed game on Steam for an eternity, a mythical beast we weren't sure was even real.

Combine that with a ridiculously fair $19.99 price tag in an era of $70 games, and you have the recipe for a perfect storm. It seems Valve wasn't prepared for the sheer force of that collective desperation.

The E502 L3 Error of a Generation

If you're trying to buy Silksong, or anything else, for that matter, you're being met with the digital tombstone of the Steam storefront: "Something Went Wrong. We were unable to service your request. Please try again later." Below it, the cryptic epitaph reads, "E502 L3."

Let's be clear, this isn't just the Silksong page that's gone down. The entire storefront has buckled under the pressure. You can't buy anything. The sheer, concentrated force of a fanbase that has been starved for years just completely flattened the biggest digital distribution platform on the planet.

I have to admit, there's something darkly beautiful about it.

A Pyrrhic Victory

The Silkposts are dead, long live Silksong. Now we just have to wait for Valve to sweep up the ashes of their servers so we can actually buy the damn thing.

It exists, it is real, and we killed the only thing standing in our way. Good job, everyone.

16:08 Update 1: It’s ALIVE!
16:20 Update 2: Aand the all too familiar error is back