The popularity of Valheim has yet to wane, evidenced by the survival game’s recently beating Among Us‘ concurrent players record on Steam. Despite releasing on Steam Early Access this month, Valheim has already made quite the mark. Within a week of launch, the title moved a staggering one million units, then went on to top three million in sales after only 16 days of availability.
It’s easy to see why players are so taken by the experience from developer Iron Gate. For one, as the name suggests, Valheim’s core premise and world revolves around Norse mythology, which itself has become much more mainstream in recent years. The co-op survival game tasks players with exploring the 10th Norse realm as battle-slain Vikings, but there’s more to it than simply fighting mythical beasts. And, clearly, millions of players are enamored.
According to Steam Charts (via The Verge), Valheim’s peak number of concurrent players recently topped 498,000. This pushes the Early Access experience past the likes of Fallout 4 and Among Us, the latter of which reached a peak concurrent player count of 438,000 in September of last year. Interestingly, Valheim now sits in the top five on Steam’s peak player records chart, beaten out only by Cyberpunk 2077 (830,000), Dota 2 (1.2 million), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.3 million), and PUBG (3.2 million).
Valheim has long way to go before it can reach the next big milestone of 830,000, which is currently occupied by Cyberpunk 2077. And PUBG’s long-held record of 3.2 million simultaneous players almost seems out of reach. However, as the last few weeks have shown, Valheim’s success serves as proof positive that pretty much anything is possible on the sales charts. Who knows, maybe the good press and positive users reviews will help the co-op experience gain another big boost in the coming weeks.
The title is expected to maintain its Early Access status throughout the remainder of this year. Iron Gate plans to continue supporting Valheim during that time, too, with several major updates scheduled to launch. It’s not clear when exactly said updates will begin going live, but players are thoroughly enjoying the content that has already been made available. At any rate, fans can look forward to the advent of a new biome, an updated combat system, and a sandbox feature over the course of the next year.
Valheim is available now on PC via Steam Early Access.
