The biggest online video game stores crashed on Thursday as they struggled to deal with high demand for Hollow Knight: Silksong – one of the most-anticipated games of the year.

Thousands of users reported they were unable to buy the game on PC store Steam after its release at 15:00 BST, with errors persisting until around 17:30.

Social media users also shared their difficulties trying to purchase Silksong on other platforms, including the Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox game stores.

Fans of Hollow Knight have been eagerly awaiting the sequel after the first game’s release in 2017, which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide according to the developer.

User reports on outage-checker Downdetector rose sharply on release, peaking at 3,750 before falling gradually over the following hour.

It led some angry fans to criticise the platform, with one calling the outage “ridiculous” and others saying it was “stupid” there was no option to pre-order the game, which they said would have avoided the issues altogether.

And further frustrated fans posted screenshots to social media platforms including X (formerly Twitter) of error codes across game stores as they tried to complete their purchase.

Meanwhile, Humble Bundle, another digital storefront, briefly told visitors in a note on its site on Thursday the game was no longer available during the high demand – which has since been resolved.

It led Christopher Larkin, a composer who worked on Hollow Knight and its sequel, to joke on X the game may have “crashed the internet“.

Meanwhile another X user, @haydenschiff, posted an image showing several gamers encountering Steam error codes while trying to share their gameplay on Twitch:

Despite many reporting they were unable to buy the game hours after it went live, the game’s demand was so significant Steam recorded more than 100,000 people were playing it within half an hour of its launch – likely buying their copies from other online stores.

“How you guys play [when] I can’t even buy,” one gamer lamented in a discussion board on the platform.

Meanwhile another X user joked they had “beat the hardest boss” – accompanied by an image showing their purchase of the Hollow Knight sequel had gone through.

And it was not just limited to fans – at least one video game publisher suggested they were also caught up in the chaos caused by demand for the game.

The Hollow Knight games were created by a tiny, three-person indie developer called Team Cherry, which is based in Adelaide, Australia.

Both games are single-character side-scrolling adventures set in a fantasy world of fighter insects. The latest game focuses on a sword-wielding princess called Hornet, who was a supporting character in the first game.

One of Team Cherry’s developers, William Pellen, was quoted in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as saying that the Hollow Knight games had a distinctive style that did not age.

“The fact that people keep discovering Hollow Knight, the original, and this was our hope with it, suggests that it hasn’t fallen out of date,” Pellen said.

“The satisfying thing with Hollow Knight was that we were making something that was to our tastes, and that meant that we were making things that were slightly different. It was inspired by older games, so its qualities were slightly different from the more modern games of the time.

“In a way that it’s sort of outside of time, hopefully Silksong can achieve that too.”

Additional reporting by Tessa Wong.