While Valheim is a massive success now, there was a point where the brilliant survival game met its sink-or-sim moment.
In February 2021, the game entered Steam Early Access with solo developer Richard Svensson pushing the game live for potential fans to discover. Valheim would eventually spend five years in early access, more than most, but Svensson explains it simply had to be released.
“[I] couldn’t afford to keep working on it,” the developer told GamesIndustry. For Svensson, working on his own, throwing the game out in early access was “the only reasonable solution at the time”.
Valheim’s early access launch sold over five million copies in a single month, and the game has now sold 17 million copies. Even so, Svensson is keeping the team small. “Eve so, the production scale now is gigantic compared to what it was at the time of the Early Access release,” he said.
The developer explained that, even if he did have the money to continue development on his own, Early Access would have been the right move forward. Many gamers still look down on the concept of releasing a game in an unfinished state, but the Valheim developer explained that it helped him truly focus on what players wanted out of the game.
“If Early Access as a model hadn’t existed, Valheim never would have gotten as big as it did,” he added. “Even if we had an enormous budget and worked on the game in secret for five years up until the launch, we never would have been able to reach the amount of people that we have.”
“Having the game out there and being able to work with the live community is really the only way that Valheim would have ever reached the success it has,” he continued.
Svensson also explained that the game’s Early Access period did last much longer than expected with the original plan to spend “two or three years” before 1.0. “Back then, when we made a new biome, it was basically the same thing with a new coat of paint, but today it’s just so much more,” he said. “It’s not just about content anymore, and that’s what made the development time longer than we first expected.”
Valheim is still being worked on after the release of 1.0, buy yhese upates are largely focused on bug fixes and balance tweaks. Of course, there’s always a chance that another major update could release eventually, as with most beloved survival games, but there are no promises right now.
