Viking survival game Valheim breaks 500,000 concurrent players

The Viking survival game Valheim, released on Steam earlier this month, recently broke the 500,000 concurrent player barrier. This puts Valheim in the top three on the gaming platform.

Based on figures from SteamDB, it appears that Valheim was played simultaneously by 502,387 players on Sunday, February 21. That has never been this high before. With that, Valheim has passed the peak in the number of simultaneous players at PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Only Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are still doing better: For Dota 2, that number was consistently well above 600,000 last weekend and the weekends before that, and for CS:GO that number is usually well over a million players.

Developer Iron Gate released Valheim on Steam on February 2, and two weeks later it had sold over two million copies. Recently, the developer announced that Valheim has sold more than three million copies. According to Iron Gate, the game is also doing well on Twitch; there it would be the seventh most streamed game, with over 20 million hours of gameplay footage viewed.

Valheim is only available as an early version for 16.79 euros. The game uses procedurally generated environments in which up to ten players must survive. The goal is to reach Asgaard. That is the name of the place where the gods dwell in Norse mythology; Midgaard is the name for the human kingdom. Players can work together in Valheim to create objects and buildings, and fight against monsters.