Valheim appears to have Steam’s biggest launch for a survival game

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Valheim is already almost the biggest survival game ever made on Steam, and it’s not even fifteen days old. On February 14, Valheim hit an all-time high of 367,443 players on Steam, just two weeks after its release on 2 February. February. Compared to the most popular survival games on Steam, this makes it the fastest growing game of its genre. Its main genre rivals, Rust and ARK: Survival Evolve, cannot boast of such a high number of competitors in their entire lifetimes, and only reached comparable heights years after launch.The only obstacle with Valheim claiming the crown of “ a survival game’s most simultaneous player ever ” is the all-time record held by Terraria, which reached 489,886 players in May 2020. It should be noted that it s was a short, unusual spike caused by the announcement and launch of the latest Terraria update. On a typical day, Terraria attracts around 30-50,000 players, with its highest peak being on June 29, 2015, with 159,171 players. As such, Valheim is already taller than Terraria for most of his life. For a better comparison, look at the two survival games that remain almost cemented near the top of Steam’s Most Played list; Rust and ARK. Despite launching in Early Access in 2014, Rust only hit over 100,000 concurrent players in March 2020. ARK had a much faster trajectory; after its launch in June 2105, it hit over 100,000 concurrent players in January 2017. ARK’s all-time high is 157,400, which it hit in March 2020. Rust, meanwhile, peaked record of 245,243 in January 2021.

This puts Valheim’s growth far ahead of its genre competition, and more in tune with the viral explosion of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. But even PUBG, which launched in March 2017, took three months to reach more than Valheim’s current concurrent player record, peaking at the time of 382,779 concurrent on July 10, 2017.This means that the only games that are truly comparable, in terms of numbers, are the major AAA titles. But these games tend to peak immediately on launch and then drop off quickly. This is because Cyberpunk 2077’s curve is essentially the complete reverse of Valheim’s. The RPG started life at an all time high of over a million players, but had fewer players than Valheim currently has in the span of a fortnight.

Due to the AAA, Valheim cannot claim to be the fastest growing game on Steam. But it’s certainly one of the platform’s biggest independent success stories, if not the biggest. It’s especially remarkable how close this all is to launch; While Among Us has a higher all-time high at 447,476, it took over a year for the game to catch on, spending much of its life with barely a few hundred players. Among Us was also fueled by the culture of streamers, which was not a notable part of Valheim’s success. From what we can see, there is no other survival game on Steam that has had such a remarkable launch.

To learn more about this massive Early Access success, take a look at our essential tips for playing Valheim.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK news and entertainment editor.

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