Viking craft 'em up Valheim has already sold one million copies
It was even briefly the fourth most-played game on Steam
Valheim is a survival sandbox game that launched in early access on Steam last week. In it, you craft things, fight things and generally survive in a Viking world. It looks a bit like Rust had a baby with Old School RuneScape, then grew up to study Norse mythology at uni and get really into heavy metal. Which is to say: it looks well cool. It seems thousands upon thousands of people would tend to agree too, because it's already sold one million copies on Steam.
Normally, these sorts of big numbers aren't particularly interesting, but this is a little indie game made by Iron Gate Studio, a dev team of just five people. It hasn't had some massive marketing campaign to give it a boost, though it is doing pretty well on Twitch (with 23.3k people following the game). I think its popularity could be partially because it looks and plays a bit like Rust (which is incredibly popular right now), except more interesting because it's about Vikings (Vikings are great).
It's not just sales that indicate how well Valheim is doing, however. In a press release, the devs say it became the fourth most played game on Steam yesterday, peaking at over 160,000 concurrent players. At the time of writing, it's dropped to number six, with just over 143,000 current players. That's nothing to shake a stick at though, it's only a few thousand players below Rust itself, and it's still sat above both Team Fortress 2 and GTA V.
Valheim is in early access, and is expected to be for about a year. I'm interested to see if it can maintain those big player counts in the months to come. The devs have already revealed a roadmap with vague details on what they're planning for the future, and it seems like a lot. This is probably one to watch.
Valheim is out now in early access on Steam, priced at £16/€17/$20.
If you've picked up the game recently and need a little help, check out our Valheim guides.