Valheim is already almost the greatest survival game of all time on Steam, and it’s not even fifteen days old. On February 14, Valheim peaked at 367,443 players on Steam, just two weeks after its February 2 release. Compared to the most popular survival games on Steam, this makes it the fastest growing game in its genre of all time. Its main genre rivals, Rust and ARK: Survival Evolve, cannot boast of such a large number of competitors in their entire lives, and have only reached comparable peaks years after launch.
The only barrier for Valheim to claim the crown of “more simultaneous players in a survival game” is the all-time record held by Terraria, which reached 489,886 players in May 2020. It should be noted that this was a short peak and caused by the announcement and launch of the final Terraria update. On a normal day, Terraria attracts around 30-50,000 players, with its previous highest peak occurring on June 29, 2015, with 159,171 players. As such, Valheim is already bigger than Terraria was for most of his life. For a better comparison, look at the two survival games that are almost cemented near the top of Steam’s most played list; Rust and ARK. Despite the launch on early access in 2014, Rust reached just over 100,000 simultaneous players by March 2020. ARK had a much faster trajectory; after launching in June 2105, it reached over 100,000 simultaneous players in January 2017. The ARK all-time peak is 157,400, which it reached in March 2020. Rust, however, peaked at 245,243 in January 2021.
This puts Valheim’s growth far ahead of its gender competition, and more in line with PlayerUnknown’s viral explosion of the battlefields. But even PUBG, which launched in March 2017, took three months to reach more than Valheim’s current record of simultaneous players, with a record of 382,779 simultaneous on July 10, 2017.This means that the only truly comparable games, in terms of numbers, are the top AAA titles. But these games tend to peak immediately at launch and then decline rapidly. In fact, the Cyberpunk 2077 curve is essentially the complete reverse of Valheim’s curve. RPG started life at a peak of more than a million players, but it had fewer players than Valheim currently has within a fortnight.
Because of AAA, Valheim cannot claim to be the fastest growing game on Steam of all time. But it is certainly one of, if not the largest, independent success story on the platform. It is particularly remarkable how close it is to launching all of this; while Between Us has an all-time high with 447,476, it took over a year for the game to catch on, spending most of its life with just a few hundred players. Among us it was also fueled by the streamer culture, something that was not a notable part of Valheim’s success. As far as we can see, there is no other survival game on Steam that has had such a remarkable release.
To learn more about this huge early access success, take a look at our essential tips for playing Valheim.
Matt Purslow is the news and entertainment writer for IGN in the UK.
