In case you haven’t heard, we have a new flavor-of-the-month game on our hands. The fantasy survival game Valheim released on Steam Early Access two weeks ago and managed to surpass the likes of Rust, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and Grand Theft Auto V. Its player numbers are nearing the most popular Steam games – CS:GO and Dota 2. In fact, this weekend Valheim managed to surpass 300,000 concurrent players on Steam and for a few hours was the most popular game on the platform.
While this might not seem super impressive to some, we should point out that Valheim is a debut game of a Swedish based studio Iron Gate. The dream start for any indie company. Valheim is published by Coffee Stain – a publisher known for publishing the likes of Goat Simulator and Satisfactory – who earlier said that Valheim sold over 1 million copies in its first week.
In case you haven’t heard about Valheim before, you should know that it’s a new Viking-themed survival game that combines all the best features the genre has to offer. It features a procedurally generated map meaning that each game world is unique, a robust building system, and random PvE events that serve players a nice change of pace between exploring, crafting, and fighting monsters.
The game is still in its Early Access and there are a lot of issues with the game that needs fixing. However, the community is overwhelmingly positive about its current state and such a big start might be exactly what developers need in order to make the game even greater. In fact, Iron Gate already released a post over at Steam page thanking the community for the early support and pledged to bring more content in the coming year.
“We are super excited to continue working together throughout 2021, as we bring you tons of cool new content, improvements and … ways to die, through the early access and beyond.”
It will be interesting to see how Valheim continues its development and if the hype surrounding the game won’t die out in the coming weeks. It’s been a while since fans of survival games got a chance to play something fresh, so we hope this won’t turn out to be another story of a game that’s locked in a permanent Early Access state.
