A small development studio conquered the Steam charts with its survival game in 2021. The big success surprised even the lead developer.
What kind of game is it? In February 2021, the five-person indie development studio Iron Gate AB from Sweden released the survival game Valheim.
- In Valheim, you play as a Viking who, after his death, is brought by a Valkyrie to the namesake land of Valheim inspired by Norse mythology, where he must prove his strength.
- To do this, you must survive against various monsters that want to attack you in your daily struggle for survival and in boss fights.
- As is typical for the genre, you must craft your own weapons and build a base – otherwise, you’ll be completely unprotected against the dangers.
In a short time, Valheim surged to a surprise hit on Steam, with up to 498,000 simultaneous active players (via SteamCharts). The Viking adventure has since sold over 10 million copies and is considered one of the best survival games on Steam with 94% positive ratings from around 430,000 reviews.
What does the developer say about the success? During the gamescom 2025, Robin Eyre, the lead developer of Valheim, spoke with the English-language magazine gamesradar about the surprising success of the survival game.
About 4.5 years after the game’s breakthrough, the developer reflects: “I had hoped for 20,000 sales […]. When we had a million sales every week for eight weeks and were at the top of the Steam charts, I just thought: ‘What is going on here?”
In the wake of the success, which surprised even the five developers, the team decided to fix bugs first before adding new content that might introduce new bugs. Eyre explains: “The first step was to ensure that everyone could play the game. One programmer spent five months fixing bugs so that all these millions of players could play the game.”
How is Valheim doing in 2025? Valheim has held up well and still maintains an average of over 10,000 players on Steam over 4 years after release. This is also due to the game being regularly updated with new content and bug fixes. Moreover, the survival game is now also available on Xbox and Mac.
Even MeinMMO editor Benedict Grothaus considers Valheim still one of the best survival games on Steam in 2025 – and that is definitely remarkable in such a large genre. You can read which games are also on his list here: The 30 Best Survival Games 2025 for PS5, Steam, and Xbox
