Valheim, the videogame that sold millions of copies

Three millions of copies sold in only two weeks, twenty millions of hours of gameplay on Twitch. It isn’t a big videogame signed by Sony or Nintendo. It is a very small swedish project, that had success thanks to Twitch, the socials and the word of mouth, that conquered millions of users. Let’s discover together Valheim, the videogame that in the last days is getting famous.

The arrival of Valheim

Valheim is a videogame produced by Coffee Stain Publishing and developed by Iron Gate Studios. It is based on the famous triptych survival – exploration – building. It is an open word themed vikings, where the videoplayer will have to fight mythological creatures, by finding the way for the Valhalla.

Even though Valheim is only available for Pc, it was already bought by three million of users. The graphic seems a little bit vintage, according to someone it remembers the first Tomb Raider of the ’90s.

It is a simple game, with a style and a gameplay already known, however it had an extraordinay success.

Just think that the producer is a very small swedish company with only five employees. Valheim is available for a price of 16,79 euros, but its success is even more extraordinary if we say that it’s even an “early access game”, which means that it’s still in a development phase and, so, the players that accept to buy and to play it, are conscious that it might have some problems.

A success that passed through Twitch

The secret of the success of Valheim is the word of mouth through Twitch. The videogame didn’t even have a big advertising campaign, however it arrived to be the second most played videogame on Steam. An unmatched success, sometimes inexplicable.

Right on the platform Steam no other game ever reached such success in a so short time and with so many users connected simultaneously (more than 500 thousands).

As wrote on The Verge, “Its growth line doesn’t look like nothing that we saw until now”.

Let’s think, than, that on Twitch it has more viewers than other famous videogames, like Call of Duty: Warzone. An exponential, uncontrolled and unpredictable success, as much as that the small company will have to hire more employees, to be able to manage the success. To say it it was the same company.

Valheim: Story of Gameplay

Valheim is an open world sandbox, which means that the players can freely walk through the world and they can even “change” it, by building. But to build we need food, materials, objects, we must be healthy, know the territory, face challenges, pitfalls and dangers.

It is possible to play alone or with a maximum of ten players that cooperate. In the videogame we wear the shoes of a group of Vikings to which God Odin gave a second chance, an afterlife, but what we see it’s a paradisiac world.

We start with nothing, like always in this kind of games, we are in a kind of purgatory and to reach the Valhalla we will have to fight a serie of mythological creatures.

We will have to create villages, roads, to explore the sea, to visit new islands, to fight dragons and other creatures, like giant turtles, for example.

Not only Valheim: the previous successes

Valheim isn’t the only one that had a such quick success, thanks to the web word of mouth. The first example was back in the 1993 and, precisely, in the midnight of the 10th of december, when the first version of the videogame Doom was released through the servers of the University of Winsconsin – Madison. Few minutes after the midnight the server collapsed because of the high number of downloads. One million and half people downloaded the videogame in the following five months, and we are talking about the 1994!

We then saw more recent successes, that reached a very high number of users thanks to Twitch, like Among Us and Fall Guys. But no one never reached the numbers of Valheim, in a such short time.

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