Nuked The other day, I saw a game named valheim atop the steam early access sales charts, with overwhelmingly positive reviews. Polygon seemed to like the $ 20 viking-themed survival game, and I thought friends might like it, too.
On February 10th, indie developer iron gate announced that valheim had already sold 1 million copies. Five days after that, valheim reached 2 million sales.
Here are a few other facts you might like to know. Here are some of the facts you may want to know about the facts.
Valheim’s trajectory is unlike anything we’ve seen before. valheim’s fate is unlike any we’ve heard before.
Battlegrounds set a record for the most simultaneous players (3.2 million) that still stands today. The game sold oodles of copies during steam sales, also without being on sale.
The game is part of an established genre of survival games. You scavenge and harvest, chop and dig, hunt and skin, then build better tools to do it all more efficiently over and over again.
You can instantly demolish a portion of a structure and refund your materials if it’s not quite right. valheim is also incredibly accessible and easy to learn.
Building is fast enough that I’m starting to build temporary forward operating bases before I venture into each new area. The fort below took just five minutes and I’ve since expanded twice.
The game currently only attracts one-tenth of its peak player count of 438,000 last September. It could still be wildly popular on mobile.
I ca n’t wait to try the game’s two- to ten-player co-op mode with my circle of friends, and that means more copies in the wild.
There may be a rush of knockoffs, fake-outs, and attempts to make other games play more like it. Iron gate will port the PC-only game to consoles and phones as well.
