Viking invasion
From a lone developer to five million players: that’s Valheim
You know the tune by now: a game appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and grabs hold of the zeitgeist for a minute, pushing ahead of far more established titles and maybe breaking a record or two along the way. Among Us. Fall Guys. Phasmophobia. And, latest to join the chorus, Valheim – a Viking survival game that, this February, joined the exclusive club of games to hit 500,000 concurrent players on Steam.
It’s an achievement only ever matched by four other titles: PUBG, CS:GO, Dota 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. And in stark contrast to its new peers, Valheim is a debut release from a Swedish studio with a headcount of five. At the outset of development, the team consisted of one person: Richard Svensson.
Svensson quit his job as lead programmer at Pieces Interactive in early 2018, as it was being acquired by THQ Nordic. He had an idea he’d been toying with in his spare time, and decided it deserved his full attention. “Richard started working on Valheim, without any income, basically full time,” recalls Henrik Törnqvist, a former colleague who was convinced to join Svensson in late 2018.
No sooner had the pair officially founded Iron Gate Studio in April 2019 than the game was signed by Coffee Stain Publishing. According to Sebastian Badylak, Coffee Stain scout and now executive producer on Valheim, the publisher saw an early glimmer of potential magic. “However, we never expected it to blow up like this. This was an order of magnitude higher than we anticipated.” Over the course of development, Badylak kept an eye on
Steam Wishlist numbers, which grew “steadily – nothing overwhelming, nothing that would indicate this level of success.”
And yet, on February 2, when the game launched into Early Access, its player numbers exploded. “It started almost immediately,” Törnqvist says. “We were all calling each other and going, ‘Wait a minute, what is happening here?’” When the game broke a million sales on its first weekend, Törnqvist thought it was just “a spike”, that sales would peter out. Instead it kept going, passing another sixfigure milestone every few days. A month on, Valheim had sold five million copies.
The obvious question is: why? What is it about Valheim that elevated it above the daily flurry of Steam releases (just over 10,000 games released on the store in 2020, according to SteamSpy) that has swallowed so many others whole?
The immediacy referenced by Törnqvist seems to rule out one of the kingmakers we’ve become used to seeing in these stories: Twitch. Comparing the figures from other recent player explosions, there’s a clear pattern – sharp spikes in Twitch viewership, followed by a steady upward curve in Steam player numbers that can take weeks or months to match the number of people watching along at home. (Though, admittedly, this is skewed slightly in the case of Among Us and Fall Guys, both also available on other platforms.)
That’s simply not the case with Valheim. Both player and viewer numbers started growing right from launch, with the former quickly outpacing the latter. Take Sunday, February 21, for example, the day concurrent players broke the 500,000
Törnqvist argues that the game’s success is not just about its quality, but the time it was allowed to brew
mark: on Twitch, viewer numbers were below a quarter of that, around 113,000. Valheim was popular with streamers, it seems, because it was already a hit.
Törnqvist argues that the game’s success is not just about its quality, but the time it was allowed to brew. “Don’t have a rushed development cycle. That’s the worst thing.” It’s an early access game that launched three years into development, unlike many of its build-as-you-go peers. There’s still plenty to be added – the current version has five of the nine planned biomes, Törnqvist says – but it’s a fully featured release in its own right. “You have to bear in mind that even if it’s early access, these are paying customers.”
Coffee Stain has been following the indie marketing textbook to the letter. With a semi-public beta last September and an active Discord community, “we built some really hardcore ambassadorship for the game,” Badylak says. But, as he admits: “There’s nothing particularly different, from our perspective, in the way we handled Valheim compared to our other titles, such as Satisfactory or Deep Rock Galactic.” Those games have been successful, but not on this scale, and not overnight.
So perhaps Valheim was simply the right game at the right time. It launched as Steam continued to break its own user number records, due to a combination of the platform’s global expansion and lockdown, and features a Viking setting that was chosen by Svensson specifically for its pop-cultural pervasiveness. (“It seems that was a good guess on our part,” Tornqvist says, tongue firmly in cheek.) It’s heartening proof that courting streamers isn’t the only route to success for smaller games, and that the right idea, given enough time – and a bit of luck – can still be enough to produce a monster hit.