The 1st surprise game of the year without a doubt is Valheim. The game which is only made by a 5 man studio managed to break a lot of records this month. It was released in February and managed to sell 3 million copies within 16 days.
On the 21st of February, it had 502.397 concurrent players on Steam. As a result, the game managed to become the most played survival game of all time on the Steam platform.
Previously, this record belonged to Terraria with 489,886 players. Of course, there is an important detail here. Terraria managed to reach this number 9 years after its launch. The fact that Valheim reached this number within a month of its debut is an indicator of how successful the game is.
The Secret Sauce of Its Popularity?
Although Valheim is not at the same standard as a big AAA game, it will certainly maintain its popularity over a much longer period of time due to the nature of the game. While the average AAA game usually lasts between 10 and 30 hours, I would like to say in my own experience that even in its current state Valheim offers around 100 hours of content.
Another important point is that livestreaming crowd is not behind the success of this game. As far as we can see, the game has managed to shake the game world in an organic way. As someone who has played the game for 90 hours, I find it natural. Abandoning the stale systems of other survival games, the game, on one hand, offers a truly difficult and advanced system, while providing a pleasant time to more casual players. I think that’s the secret behind its popularity.
I do not think the game will slow down its record breaking pace anytime soon and will rise to the #1 spot of the Steam chart sometime in the coming weeks, maybe even days.
