Valheim has become one of Steam's unexpected hits. The cooperative open-world survival game was created by a small team that did not expect a mass audience before release. As a result, the project entered the top of the most popular survival games on the Valve platform, with a record of half a million players online simultaneously.
Creative director Robin Eyre admitted that he was counting on 20,000 sales before the release. But in the first two months of early access, Valheim sold about a million copies, and a year later the game was purchased by 10 million people. When it launched in early access in February 2021, only five people were working on the project, and for the first five months, only one programmer was fixing bugs.
The team focused on the stability of the servers and fixing bugs so that new updates would not create additional problems. Initially, it was planned to create only five biomes, but now there are six.
The developers have a positive view of projects inspired by Valheim. Eyre noted that it is interesting to watch the development of the genre, and games like Enshrouded do not cause a sense of rivalry, only demonstrating how other studios adapt Valheim's ideas to their projects.