Many triple-A studios ponder for days, weeks, months about how to get their games to be hugely successful. Celebrity involvement like Cyberpunk 2077 can be a winner, or maybe just adding to an already massive franchise will do the trick like Assassin's Creed. But sometimes, indie games just flourish like magic and you can hear marketing teams in the distance enviously asking, how? How is it that a small game like Valheim has picked up enough success to get to 5 million copies sold when it's not even finished yet?
Valheim if you don't already know is a Viking survival game, of sorts. It's often compared to Steam success Rust, in that you collect resources and build a base. What moves Valheim away from just being a re-skinned Rust is that there are bosses for you to defeat to 'complete' the game and move onto the next part of your afterlife.
It's all in all, a really neat game that you can play however you like - whether that be sailing the seas, making complex bases, speed-running the bosses and more. And it's so cool, in fact, that more than 5 million copies of the title have been sold. What an incredible achievement, especially if you consider the game is still in early access and has only been out a month.
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Early access on Steam just means the game isn't yet 'complete', but it is in a playable state ready to be enjoyed. More updates, features, systems and more are expected to come to a game in early access, and as we all saw with critically acclaimed Hades, getting feedback from an active player base before deeming the project finished can really be a huge benefit to a game.
In any case, congrats to Iron Gate for the incredible success Valheim is seeing right now - I mean it had half a million concurrent players on the title just the other day. We can't wait to where you take the game next.
Featured Image Credit: Iron Gate