Metroidvanias (or “Search Action” games) are one of the most beloved indie game genres. But while other indie genres like Simulator Games and Cozy Games have formed their own communities on live streaming, Metroidvanias have struggled to make the leap onto platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
Or at least they had, until the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, the much-anticipated sequel to developer Team Cherry’s first commercial release Hollow Knight. As fans clamored for a new entry in the series, they waited 8 and a half long years before their wish was fulfilled. In this article, we’ll look at how this build-up of hype led to the most viewed Metroidvania game launch ever and review the popularity of the subgenre as a whole.
TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet:
- Silksong smashed other Metroidvania releases with 4X viewership in its debut week vs. other titles in their debut month.
- Team Cherry’s oath of silence paid off: The air of mystique around Silksong prompted hundreds of thousands of chat mentions on Twitch for every announcement.
- Metroidvanias need new releases to pique streamers’ interest. They bring in 1/10th of the viewership of live service-friendly genres like Survival Games.
Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Low-Key Marketing Spins Up Streaming Discourse
Silksong made a splash upon release. In its first week, Silksong generated 19M hours watched with a peak viewership of 512K – that’s the kind of peak viewership usually reserved for AA or even AAA Shooter launches. Notably, 72.2% of this viewership was from Twitch: It’s possible that the game’s high skill ceiling attracted hardcore gamers, similar to how Souls-likes have historically performed well on Twitch. Still though, Silksong was supported by a wide range of streamers: The first week saw 842K airtime hours, suggesting everyone was willing to jump on the bandwagon for the game’s release. That includes smaller streamers, who may have been more willing to try the game out thanks to its low $20 price tag (USD).
Looking at the top streamers for Silksong reveals a clear front runner: Cellbit brought in just under 1M hours watched by himself, putting him 550K hours ahead of second place streamer Distortion2. But with Cellbit as the one exception, the rest of Silksong’s viewership had a nice even spread among other streamers. This is a great sign of robust support for the title, rather than just a couple high-profile sponsored streamers standing out from the pack. And, even better, this wide spread of support is also global: Among the top 10 streamers, there are 5 different languages being spoken.
The reason for this sheer breadth of support is the long incubation period between when Hollow Knight released, when Silksong was announced, and when the game finally released. Keep in mind that for gamers who had formative experiences with Hollow Knight, many would have gone from gamers to streamers in those 8.5 years and grown their audience. Time allowed these nodes to connect, creating a shared atmosphere of excitement among diverse types of streamers. Add to this Team Cherry’s coy strategy of releasing very little information about Silksong in the intervening years, and you have a community of fans trained to seek out and discuss news about the game (we’ve seen a similar strategy from Rockstar for GTA VI).
We can see the results of this strategy by looking at mentions of both “Hollow Knight” and “Silksong” on live-streaming. Things really kicked off with the Nintendo Direct for Switch 2 when Silksong was promised to be coming to the console, with chat mentions of “Silksong” hitting 91.6K that week. Meanwhile, buzz around the series in general stayed consistent between game showcases with “Hollow Knight” floating around 20K chat mentions per week. Note the pacing here, with one big tease every 3 months leading up to Silksong’s release and 133.2K weekly chat mentions of “Silksong” when the game’s release date was finally announced at Gamescom 2025.
Streamers Love Metroidvanias, But Mainstream Popularity Still Eludes the Subgenre
Elements of the Metroidvania subgenre have become so ubiquitous that the label is often applied to any game with backtracking, sequential powerups, or object-gated progression. But for our purposes here, we defined a sample of 26 popular, “true” Metroidvania titles (all 2D) that were released in the last 10 years. We then looked at the shift in hours watched for this sample over time.
The most obvious observation here, as labelled, is that Metroidvanias rely on new releases to cause spikes in hours watched. Like other single-player, limited-campaign genres (e.g., RPGs), streamers mostly burn through the game’s content and then shelve these titles until DLC releases. The exception to this rule is those games with thriving speedrunning communities, like Super Metroid, Dead Cells, or Axiom Verge. These games will be revisited over and over again at high-profile speedrunning events like Games Done Quick or RTA in Japan.
Back on this graphic though: Most of the bigger release spikes were caused by sequels. Take Q2 2022, for example, which saw 14.2M hours of Metroidvania content thanks to the releases of both Rogue Legacy 2 and Salt and Sacrifice. These are hardly the only examples though, with more viewership for Metroid Dread, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. The crowning jewel here is still Silksong though, which reignited interest in a range of Metroidvanias to the tune of 22.3M hours watched in Q3 2025 so far (1st – 7th of September).
Let’s put in perspective just how incredible that performance is. Comparing the highest month’s worth of viewership for the 26 games in our sample, Silksong comes out on top with 13.2M hours watched – and that’s without a complete month tracked so far! In just 4 days, Silksong generated more hours watched than the 2nd and 3rd place titles combined over their highest month each.
This is definitely cause for celebration for Team Cherry, and a step in the right direction for the Metroidvania subgenre as a whole when it comes to mainstream adoption on live-streaming platforms. However, these numbers still pale in comparison to the heights that other subgenres are reaching. Take Survival Games, for example, which can bring in 10X this amount of viewership for the most popular games. The Survival subgenre is more friendly for intermixing with elements like live service or MMO, which makes them more appealing to live-streaming audiences. What would be incredible is if someone could develop a live service Metroidvania game: Say, one with a shifting map shaped by players that could provide opportunities for constant engagement.
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Silksong’s success is an outlier at the moment, a performance earned by a much-loved IP, strong branding, and the right marketing strategy to capitalize on both. Newer Metroidvanias may not be able to use the same approach, but they can certainly ride the wave of mainstream interest that Silksong has generated to reach a far wider audience than before! Take the upcoming Hollow Knight-inspired game Crowsworn which shares a similar dark aesthetic.
But where the real interest lies is in those series that originated the Metroidvania subgenre: Metroid and Castlevania. Castlevania in particular hasn’t had a new Metroidvania-style entry since 2008’s Order of Ecclesia (excluding remakes, remasters, and mobile spin-offs). This would be a fantastic moment for Konami to capitalize on the renewed hype for the genre by announcing its own upcoming title (which has so far been usurped by Koji Igarashi with his Bloodstained series). Until then, the space is left open for indie developers to seize on the live-streaming audiences supporting this subgenre.
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