Valheim may well be Steam's biggest-ever viral hit, with 2M copies sold

Valheim
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)

Viking survival game player count that would put many other massive, hit games to shame. 

Compared to same-genre hits like cracked into the top 10 last weekend.

It's not even driven by  massive hype from big Twitch streamers, as is often the case with hits like this. Check out this chart from SteamDB, which shows steady growth in viewership that flattens out rather than the kinds of massive spikes of viewership over player count that herald a wave of popularity from that kind of exposure. People are playing, not just watching, Valheim.

A chart of twitch viewership vs concurrent players for the game Valheim.

(Image credit: SteamDB)

Its large player count puts Valheim behind only Terraria.

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Valheim Stagbreaker war hammer

(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)

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That kind of growth in just two weeks is a stark contrast from big, $60 games from publishers with huge advertising budgets, which tend to debut at huge player counts but rapidly trickle off to much more reasonable numbers. Valheim has instead started as a $20 game and rocketed into success. Even the meteoric rise of Among Us last year took a month and a half to grow from 5,000 to 370,000 players. (Among Us, it should be noted, has a massive mobile audience not tracked on Steam.)

Iron Gate AB has clearly struck a nerve with Valheim, tapping into something that people either really want or really think they want. FOMO might explain a small jump past the hundred-thousand or so mark, but something about a combination of Valheim's gameplay and price have made the Early Access game shoot towards the stars.

If you're curious about the game, maybe check out our how to set up your Valheim multiplayer server so you, too, can strive to please Odin.

Update: A previous version of this story, published February 14th, cited statistics for that day. It has been updated to reflect the 2 million sales news.

Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.