"For five months there was one programmer fixing bugs": Valheim devs were not prepared for their Viking survival game's explosive success

When Valheim first launched in early access in 2021, it seemed like the Viking-inpsired survival game was all anybody could talk about. Now, four years and millions of sales later, the developers reflect on their indie project's success.

"It was just five of us going into early access," lead developer Robin Eyre tells GamesRadar+ at Gamescom. "I was hoping for 20,000 sales [...] When we were getting one million sales every week for eight weeks, we were on top of Steam charts, I was like, 'what is going on?'"

It's not just survival games borrowing from Valheim, though; even Fortnite is getting in on the action. "I remember when we released, and there were so many people getting killed by trees, and then six months later they were doing that in Fortnite," Eyre remembers. "It was so nice to see that we had an impact, because before us, trees would just fall down, and not have any impact." Now I know who to blame every time a falling tree kills me in a video game.

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I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.

With contributions from

Ali JonesManaging Editor, News

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