Following the relatively recent 1.0 launch of survival crafting game Valheim last month, CEO of developer Iron Gate, Richard Svensson, has opened up about the team’s decision to go with an Early Access launch all the way back in 2021. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Svensson revealed that the team essentially “couldn’t afford to keep working on it” without the influx of revenue from Early Access sales.
The fact that the survival crafting title saw almost immediate success certainly helped, and Svensson acknowledged that the massive reach garnered by Valheim during Early Access likely wouldn’t have been possible if the studio had decided to just launch the title in its 1.0 form directly.
“If Early Access as a model hadn’t existed, Valheim never would have gotten as big as it did. 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.”
Iron Gate decided to release Valheim during Early Access in February 2021 because it felt like “the only reasonable solution at the time.” For the team. It would go on to sell over 5 million copies in its first month alone, and had crossed the 10 million mark by 2022. As of its 1.0 launch, the survival crafting game had managed to sell 17 million copies.
“The original plan was perhaps two or three years in Early Access, but with every update our ambitions have only increased. We have also always tried to keep the team relatively small, but even so, the production scale now is gigantic compared to what it was at the time of the Early Access release.”
Interestingly, the team’s ambitions over the years also led to Valheim getting its own unique spin on biomes. Rather than settling for just adding a swamp to the game, for instance, the team instead decided to give its new zones their own distinct identity, and as a result, came up with Mistlands and Ashlands.
“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. It’s not just about content anymore, and that’s what made the development time longer than we first expected.”
Valheim is now available on PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2. For more details on the survival crafting title, take a look at our review, where we gave it a score of 8 out of 10. We praised the new additions brought along with the 1.0 update, like the Deep North biome, as well as the refinements that had been made to the core building and crafting gameplay loop over the course of its Early Access period. However, we still found Ashlands and Mistlands to be more tedious than fun, and the steep building costs in the early game also felt quite tedious.
