Valheim It’s almost the biggest survival game on Steam already, and it hasn’t even been a fortnight since its launch.
On February 14, Valheim reached an all-time high of 367,443 players on Steam, just two weeks after its release on February 2, 2021. Compared to the most popular survival games on Steam, this makes it the most popular game. rapid growth in the genre. Its genre rivals, such as Rust and ARK: Survival Evolve, cannot boast such a high number of simultaneous players in their entire lifetime, and only hit comparable peaks years after launch.
The only barrier for Valheim to claim the crown of “survival game with more simultaneous players in history ‘‘is Terraria’s all-time high, which reached 489,886 players in May 2020. It should be noted that this was a short and unusual spike caused by the announcement and release of the latest game update. On a typical day, Terraria draws around 30-50,000 players, with its previous highest peak occurring on June 29, 2015, with 159,171 players. As such, Valheim is already larger than Terraria has been for most of her 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 its launch in Early Access in 2014, Rust only reached an estimated 100,000 concurrent players in March 2020. ARK had a much faster track record; After its launch in June 2105, it reached more than 100,000 concurrent players in January 2017. ARK’s all-time peak is 157,400, which it reached in March 2020. Rust, meanwhile, reached its all-time peak of 245,243 in January of 2021.
This places Valheim’s growth far ahead of its competition in the genre and more in line 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 maximum concurrent players, with a peak of 382,779 concurrent players 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, Cyberpunk 2077’s curve is essentially the complete inverse of Valheim’s. The role-playing game began life at an all-time high of over a million players, but had fewer players than Valheim currently has in just fifteen days.
Thanks 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.
Furthermore, while Among Us has an all-time highest peak with 447,476 concurrent players, the game took more than a year to catch up, spending much of its life with just a few hundred players. Among Us was also driven by streamer culture, something that hasn’t been 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 release.
