A week after hitting one million copies sold, Viking-inspired survival game Valheim hit yet another milestone yesterday, doubling that figure to a cool two million in just 13 days. Valheim, developed by the five-person team at Iron Gate, launched in early access via Steam on February 2nd.
Iron Gate shared the news in a Steam listing update, noting a new peak concurrent player record of 360,000 players over the weekend, doubling last week’s milestone of 160,000. Impressive stuff for a game that has yet to launch in earnest, and we’d wager the figure will surge even higher.
More Valheim Players Than Real-World Vikings
Interestingly, given Valheim‘s Norse inspiration, there are now more Valheim owners than actual real-world, living, breathing Vikings at any time in history. As Iron Gate explains, Vikings numbers peaked at half a million around 1300 AD.
Doubly impressive is the glut of Steam early access survival games Valheim is competing with for players’ attention – Rust, Raft, Ark, to name but a few. While Valheim certainly borrows many elements from the genre and the gather-craft-build-fight formula remains intact, its ‘procedurally-generated purgatory’ appears to offers enough variety and fresh ingredients to make it one of 2021’s early breakout hits.
The Valheim developer also took the opportunity to thank players for their support:
“Everyone at Iron Gate has really been appreciating all the messages, love, questions and thoughts from all of you, so please keep them coming! And again, a big thank you to all of you for helping us reach this ridiculous milestone in under two weeks of sailing onto Early Access. We’re so excited to continue working with you all to reach Asgard together, and we’ll be sharing more soon on what’s next.”
Despite Valheim already ticking many boxes, Iron Gates intends to keep chipping away for at least another year before a 1.0 release, with four chunky updates already planned for release in 2021, brimming with new bosses, biomes, and weapons.
