Valheim Leaves Early Access After 5.5 Years. "This Is What Early Access Is Supposed to Look Like"

Valheim left Early Access on September 9, five and a half years after launch, with 17 million copies sold and a final biome, Deep North, closing out the entire map. It's one of the rare productions in Steam Early Access history that actually reached the finish line it set for itself at the start, instead of dissolving into years of updates with no clear end.

From a one-person project to Steam's second most-played game

Richard Svensson started building Valheim as a solo side project in 2018. Henrik Törnqvist joined him, together they founded Iron Gate, and the team grew to five people by 2020. On February 2, 2021, the game entered Early Access on Steam and exploded faster than anyone on that five-person team could have predicted: a million copies sold in eight days, two million in thirteen, and on February 21 that same year a peak of 502,387 concurrent players, the fourth-highest figure in Steam history at the time, ahead of GTA V and Destiny 2 on that metric, second only to CS:GO. The team doubled in size after launch just to keep up with the scale of the success.

The 1.0 launch itself didn't repeat that record, and fairly shouldn't have, since it's a different moment in the game's life cycle. Within hours of launch, Valheim crossed 130,000 concurrent players on Steam, with a peak of roughly 125,000 logged at 16:00 UTC. That's a good number for a game returning to the spotlight after five and a half years, but still well short of the 502,000 from February 2021, when Valheim briefly outpaced Dota 2 in concurrent players.

What Deep North brings

The game's eighth and final biome is a frozen region populated by Gammeltrolls and underground Elakings, with two new dungeon types, three new armor tiers, Norse-style weapons, a Frostfire crossbow, and an unlimited-use grappling hook. The 1.0 launch also marks the game's first simultaneous release on new platforms: PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 join PC, Linux, Mac, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on the same day, with full crossplay across every platform from day one, instead of the months-long port delays that are typical for a launch like this.

Five years, three biomes, one consistent roadmap

The road to Deep North wasn't random or chaotic. Mistlands, the fog-and-ruined-towers biome, shipped in November 2022. Ashlands, a burning lava region with more than thirty new weapons and ten new enemies, in May 2024. Each major biome was spaced roughly a year and a half from the last, a consistent rhythm rarely seen in Early Access productions at this scale. The 1.0 launch also brought the game's first price increase since February 2021, from $19.99 to $29.99, a 50% jump. Players who bought the game earlier keep it at no extra cost; the change only applies to new purchases on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. Iron Gate also isn't hiding that not everything got wrapped up: the ocean biome remains in the same state it's been in for years, with no announced changes tied to 1.0.

Small team, clear scope, an actual finish

Reviews since launch have been strongly positive, with Game8 giving the game a 90 out of 100 and an "Outstanding" label. More interesting than the score itself is how industry reviewers framed the significance of this launch: this is what Early Access is supposed to look like. A small team, a clearly defined scope, regular substantial updates, and an actual finish line that got reached. That line stings when you set it against the rest of the genre Valheim helped popularize, which is full of survival games that have spent longer in Early Access than Valheim did while shipping a fraction of its content. Valheim's own 2021 success drove a wave of imitators that copied its aesthetic and mechanical skeleton without copying the discipline behind regularly, consistently delivering the content they promised, which five and a half years later puts the original in a completely different position than most of its own clones.

That contrast is sharpest set against another loud Early Access debut from the same year. Slay the Spire 2, another record-setting Early Access launch from this same year, went through three separate waves of mass negative reviews on Steam between March and May, some of them triggered by balance decisions made during Early Access itself. Valheim avoided that kind of scenario for five and a half years, despite having plenty of opportunities for it: no comparable wave of controversy, no drama around a single update, just the consistent closing-out of a biome list mapped out from the start, all the way to the last one.