Iron Gate AB Commences Expansion of its Five-Person Dev Team As Valheim Crosses 3 Million Copies Sold
Launched at the start of this month, Valheim surpassed 1 million units sold in just a week. The success didn’t stop there, however, as the Viking survival game tripled that number and crossed 3 million sales less than three weeks after release today. To celebrate, developer Iron Gate AB posted an announcement displaying its appreciation and revealed plans to upgrade its tiny five-person team.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Iron Gate’s Henrik Törnqvist explained how the incredible success of the game caught the team off-guard. “We had a feeling that it would sell pretty well, at least to sustain us, you know. But it being a million seller, and now two million seller, is something we could never have guessed.”
At the time of writing, Valheim is the 7th most streamed game on Twitch and is topping Steam charts with over 60,000 positive reviews. According to Steam Charts, the title hit an all-time peak of 391,325 players and the concurrent users statistic is not far behind. Suffice it to say, Valheim has made quite a name for itself in the span of 17 days.
“We were also fairly optimistic, or I would say very optimistic, in terms of how the game would perform. But this is above and beyond all of our wildest imaginations.” adds Sebastian Eriksson of Coffee Stain Publishing, Valheim’s publisher.
“[It’s] even to a point where we internally discussed that if someone had suggested we would sell two million copies within two weeks, we would have just laughed at that person and said, yeah, okay, you’re apparently just trolling. But yeah, here we are. So, as Henrik said, pretty humbling, and quite overwhelming, also.”
Moving forward, Iron Gate affirms that the expansion process for the small developer team has begun. Although the studio has held its own so far, Törnqvist says that they’ve “reached our limit by now of everything we can do.”
Valheim is out now on Steam Early Access and has a ton of content planned for release throughout 2021.
