Valheim is Steam’s newest PC game, and it’s now selling 3 million copies

The other day I saw a game called Valheim on top of the Steam Early Access sales charts, with overwhelmingly positive reviews. Polygon I seem to like the Viking-themed $ 20 survival game, and I thought friends might like it too. I was not quite ready to commit yet – I waffled for a while before trying to give it a go. Know who bought it while I was making the decision? One million other people.

On February 10, just eight days after launch, indie developer Iron Gate announced it Valheim has already sold 1 million copies. Five days later, Valheim Reached 2 million sales. On Friday, February 19th, two days after we originally published this post, it garnered 3 million sales.

Here are some other facts you may want to know:

• It was now the second most played game on the whole steam at some point, before each match saving Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and it now sits comfortably at number three.
• A top ten record has already been set for simultaneous players on Steam with around 392,000 on Monday Grand Theft Auto V from the top 10 chart.
• By Friday, it had reached the number 9 spot with 410,000 players Mail down a flight of stairs.
• It topped the Steam bestseller list during Valve’s Steam Lunar New Year sale – despite not having a discount.

As PC player point out, Valheim‘s trajectory is nothing short of what we’ve seen before.

The nearest parallel is perhaps PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – which came in the same way from Steam Early Access, sold many copies during steam sales (also without being for sale), set a record for the Steam game with the most simultaneous players (3.2 million) released today still standing, and the whole battle royal genre that produced today Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and more. But even PUBG took months to reach the kind of numbers that Valheim has it now, and it was with a genre-defining, action-packed, nail-biting, streamer-friendly game that makes for a wonderfully tense watch.

Valheim, for comparison, is slow and methodical. It’s part of an established genre of survival games where you take out, harvest, chop and dig, hunt and peel, and then build better tools to do it again and again more efficiently. Right here, you’re also a bad Viking who can (eventually) build fortresses and ships, you hunt down gods for sport, and you explore a giant giant map filled with idyllic scenery, charming music, a touch of built-in mystery, and some enemies who bump into me convincingly enough that I get a slight feeling Dark souls vibe out of it. Oh, and if you cut down trees, they fall and hit other things (like you) for great damage! It will never get old.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Like Cass Marshall on Polygon point out, it’s also incredibly accessible and easy to learn – I convinced myself that I do not like survival games because of their typically rigid mechanics, Valheim everything seems to make sense without thinking too hard. I do not have to spend centuries felling trees to build basic tools, there is no need to purchase blueprints (recipes open as soon as you get new materials), and I do not have to carefully plan how I want my house should not look like before I start building. You can demolish a part of a structure immediately and refund your material if it is not completely in order.

In fact, the construction is fast enough that I start building temporary bases for the advance before venturing into each new area, like the small fort below that lasted five minutes and I expanded twice.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

There is no saying how long the magic will last for me or for the 2 million players of the game, and of course it counts. It was downhill for Between us on a computer, which currently attracts only a tenth of its highest player number of 438,000 in September last year (although it may still be very popular on mobile devices).

But I imagine that word-of-mouth detention can continue Valheim go for a while. I can not wait to try the cooperation mode of two to ten players with my circle of friends, and that means more specimens in nature.

As Valheim has endurance, expect to hear the name of this game on many lips in the coming months. If history is an indication, we’ll soon see a rush of outages, false attempts and attempts to make other games play more like it, and there could be a lot of pressure on Iron Gate to move the PC-only game to consoles to wear. and phones too.

Update, February 19: Valheim has now sold 3 million copies and now has a new record for the ninth most simultaneous players at any given time on Steam.