Perhaps allowing preorders for a day or two might have helped spread the load? Or at least moved it earlier so that the checkout load didn't overlap with the load from users downloading.
I was thinking about this for the recent GMTK game jam, which crashed itch.io.
Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.
1. That's Valve's prerogative, not the developer's. If they're not partnered with Valve they may not have had the option to enact pre-purchases. [1]
2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.
I thought they already did something like this. I recall some people complaining because the naive decryption process would double the required hard drive space while the bundle was unpacking on release day.
Pretty sure they already do it. I've also noticed that if you have a fast connection (like 1 Gb/s down), it might be faster to download the game when it releases than it is to preload it and then decrypt it, since the decryption process is quite slow.
Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.