Valheim hits 500k concurrent players on Steam

If you hadn't yet noticed, Viking survival game Valheim is really hitting the big time - and after selling 3m copies in 16 days, it's now reached a concurrent player peak of over 500k. Not bad for a dev team of only five people.

According to Steam Charts, yesterday Valheim hit a milestone of 502,387 concurrent players, putting it up there with some pretty massive games. Only four other titles have ever achieved a concurrent peak of over 500k: PUBG, CS:GO, Dota 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. That means Valheim has achieved a higher player peak than Terraria, Fallout 4 and Among Us (although it's worth noting that many of these games released on several platforms - Among Us was hugely popular on mobile, pushing it to an overall peak of 1.5m).

Valheim also has a little way to go before challenging PUBG for the top spot, as the battle royale peaked at a whopping 3.2m concurrent players in January 2018.

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At time of writing, Valheim is currently beating Team Fortress 2, Apex Legends, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Rust for concurrent players on Steam (via Steam Charts). The latter game, of course, had its own moment back in January: achieving a peak of 244,394 Steam players and 1.37m Twitch viewers. Valheim isn't doing quite as well as Rust on Twitch (with a peak of 147k viewers), but it's more than doubled Rust's player peak on Steam. It seems everyone has developed a taste for co-op survival games, although frankly I'd describe Rust as a little more PvP.

It's a pretty spectacular start for an early access game made by such a small team, and Iron Gate said it plans to expand in order to meet the demands of its enormous playerbase (via PC Gamer). "The Iron Gate team wanted to share one more big thank you to everyone who has already joined us on this exciting journey of mythological proportions," the studio said in a post marking its 3m-player milestone. "To keep up with the old norse references, this is now equivalent to 74,319 longhouses stuffed with Vikings singing songs and celebrating victory with some great tasting mead, so.. SKÅL!"