Valheim Exits Early Access After Five Years With Final Biome

Valheim, the Viking survival game that became one of the surprise commercial phenomena of the pandemic era, left Steam Early Access on Tuesday after more than five and a half years, closing out its development with a final biome its own developers have spent years building toward.

The Swedish studio Iron Gate released Valheim into early access on February 2, 2021, and the game sold more than a million copies in its first ten days, a pace that startled even its five-person development team. It has since sold roughly 17 million copies, according to figures cited by Tech Times, making it one of the best-selling early access titles in Steam's history alongside games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Palworld.

The Deep North, and a price increase

Version 1.0, released Wednesday alongside publisher Coffee Stain, adds the Deep North, a frozen biome Iron Gate has described as the game's final planned region, built around blizzards, abandoned villages and a new enemy called the Gammeltroll, an aged and more dangerous variant of the game's familiar trolls. Players can now tame rideable moose and craft a new tier of equipment called Bloodgold, and the update introduces underground areas tied to a creature called the Elakingar. The full release also brings Valheim to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 for the first time, with cross-platform multiplayer now enabled across every version of the game. Existing saves carry over into 1.0 without requiring players to start new worlds or characters.

The milestone comes with a price increase, to $29.99 across digital storefronts, up from the roughly $20 price that had held since early access began. The current listing on Steam describes the game as "a collaborative exploration and survival game for 1-10 players, set in a procedurally generated afterlife inspired by Viking culture."

Reception has stayed strong

Early reaction has largely mirrored the game's reputation over the past five years. Valheim carries an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam, with 94 percent of its more than 258,000 total reviews positive and 91 percent positive among reviews posted in the last 30 days. In a review published ahead of launch, PCGamesN's Shaun Walton called the Deep North "everything that a Viking adventure should be" and "a masterpiece that everyone needs to play," while noting the frustration of reaching it: "I have never been more in love with, and yet this remarkably frustrated by, a videogame before," he wrote, pointing to grinding stretches earlier in the game and the long-criticized Mistlands biome as obstacles patient players will have to push through first.

For Iron Gate, the 1.0 release closes a development arc that began with a five-person team in 2021 and grew, largely through word of mouth and cooperative play among friends, into one of the defining survival games of its generation. The studio has since grown to roughly 16 staff, with about eight still working directly on the game, and has said it intends to stay small and close-knit rather than scale up dramatically despite Valheim's commercial success. It has not announced what comes next, though the game's trajectory has already reshaped expectations for how far a modest early access release can stretch: a title that launched at around $20 with a handful of developers is ending its journey as a full-priced, console-native game played by tens of millions of people across five platforms.