V Rising came out on May 18, and I would bet that on the day almost none of you would have ever heard of it. One week later and it’s sold over 500,000 copies, and as I type this is being played by more people on Steam than Elden Ring.
So what’s V Rising? It’s a vampire game where you get to create your own character and do some fighting. More specifically—and you’ll have to bear with me on this—it’s a vampire game that is a little bit of loads of other games all rolled into one. There’s some Diablo there. But also some base-building. Some survival stuff. Adventuring in an open world. And it supports co-op but also competitive multiplayer. Oh, and it’s still in Early Access.
It’s a mixed bag, then, but those are all also exactly the kinds of games that PC-centric players go wild for. Throw in the fact it has some cool splash art and a relatively cheap price-tag and maybe it’s not the biggest surprise that, just one week after launch, 127,000 people played V Rising on Steam today. That puts it at #6 on the entire platform, behind only juggernaut online stalwarts like Counter-Strike and Destiny.
It was apparently a surprise to the people actually making the game, too. “I absolutely did not expect this many people”, developer Stunlock’s Jeremy Fielding told IGN. “I don’t think anybody expected it to be quite this big.” Well, buddy, it is. There were over 50,000 people playing the game within hours of its release, and it’s all-time concurrent record on Steam is over 150,000 players.
(I’ll add here that Stunlock are hardly first-timers here, or strangers to initial success on Steam, having released Battlerite a few years ago to similar headlines, so maybe they weren’t totally surprised)
You can check out the game on Steam here. And because I’ve seen loads of people asking this, while there is multiplayer, you absolutely do not need it to play and enjoy the game. It works as a single-player experience just fine. We’ll hopefully have some impressions of the game after we’ve spent some more time with it later this week!