Valheim went on Steam exactly five weeks ago, and it’s been on fire ever since. Iron Gate’s Viking Survival Sim flared up the charts, selling 5 million copies in Early Access in just one month and surpassing major titles like Dota 2 in terms of simultaneous active players.
Steam reviews for Valheim radiates a tangible sense of awe and relief. Players often compare the feeling with the first time they played Minecraft, amazed at the game’s scope, depth and atmosphere, and questioned how a team of just five developers managed to pack such a captivating experience into a 1GB download. Valheim unleash players in an original empire of the Viking purgatory, a vast, procedurally generated world filled with mythical Norwegian animals, open sea, hunting and crafting. It is dense, yet forgiving; action-packed yet peaceful.
To date, Iron Gate has sold more than 5.7 million copies Valheim. There are only five people left in the development team.
“We are doing our best,” Henrik Tornqvist, co-founder of Iron Gate, told Engadget. “It’s been quite hectic since its launch.”
Iron Gate
Tornqvist and co-founder of the studio, Richard Svensson, want to hire a few more people, including a QA manager to handle the supply of bug reports from millions of new beta testers. Otherwise it gets support from Coffee Stain Publishing – the people responsible for it Book Simulator, a true grandfather of viral video games.
Svensson starts work on Valheim in 2017, as a side-noise. During the day, he and Tornqvist were colleagues at the Swedish studio Pieces Interactive, but by the beginning of 2018, Svensson had left to focus fully on Valheim.
“At the end of 2018, I also left to work with him,” Tornqvist said. ‘We founded the company Iron Gate in April 2019 and then we knew about where we wanted to go Valheim. ”