Development History

0:00 Release trailer

6:23 The development of Valheim, the Viking survival game made by Iron Gate Studio in Skövde, Sweden, ran for nine years, five years and seven months of them in early access. It began in 2017 as a one-man networking experiment called Fejd, became a company in 2019, sold a million copies in its first week on Steam in February 2021 and passed 17 million before the Valheim 1.0 Release on Sep 9, 2026. Along the way Iron Gate Studio abandoned its first public roadmap, shipped seven named updates, brought the game to Xbox, Mac, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, and grew from five people to eight without ever becoming a large studio.

Quick facts

Fejd and the alpha (2017–2020)

0:47 Richard Svensson started the project in 2017 while still employed at Pieces Interactive. By his own account it was "a test project" for a networking back end that needed a game and a setting; Viking games were fashionable, so he chose Vikings, and eventually the game became more interesting than the networking. A childhood memory of sitting inside a hut you built while rain falls outside became a guiding star (Wikipedia).

2:02 The working title was Fejd, Swedish for a feud or vendetta. In early 2018 a scout for Coffee Stain Publishing saw Svensson posting about the prototype on Facebook, judged it "super rough" but complete in its key ingredients, and messaged him to offer publishing help. Svensson left Pieces Interactive in 2018 to work full time, and the game was released as a free alpha on itch.io in June 2018 (Wikipedia).

1:07 The itch.io build found an audience before there was a company; programmer Jonathan Smårs later called it the point at which Svensson realized "people seem to be interested in it". Henrik Törnqvist, a former colleague, quit his job to join as co-founder, and Iron Gate Studio was incorporated in Skövde in 2019 (Iron Gate press page). Coffee Stain revealed the game publicly, under the Valheim name, on Jun 13, 2020 during the PC Gaming Show week (PCGamesN).

Early access launch (February 2021)

5:00 Valheim entered Steam Early Access for Windows and Linux on Feb 2, 2021 at $19.99. Launch day was, as the team remembers it, "kind of a normal day": the five-person studio gathered two hours beforehand to make sure everyone pressed their buttons at the same moment. The team hoped for enough sales to fund early access; one developer recalled expecting around 20,000 copies.

6:02 Two hours after release the sales figures began to arrive, and Coffee Stain's projection for the whole first week was passed within those two hours. The game sold one million copies in its first week and five million within a month, hit a Steam concurrent-player peak of 502,387 in February 2021, reached 10 million copies by July 2022 and 12 million by 2023 (Wikipedia; Iron Gate, About). By the time the 1.0 date was announced in June 2026 the total stood at 17 million (GamesBeat). Full figures are on Reception and Sales.

The 2021 roadmap and its cancellation

27:06 Alongside the launch Iron Gate published a roadmap of four updates for 2021: Hearth & Home, Cult of the Wolf, Ships & the Sea and Mistlands (PCGamesN). The plan did not survive contact with several million players. In a Steam post of Jun 10, 2021 the studio explained that it had not been prepared for the influx, that bug fixing and stability had consumed the spring, and that it would not be able to deliver four updates that year; the roadmap was taken down, Hearth & Home was set for the third quarter, and Mistlands was named as the update that would follow it (NME; Tech Times). Ships & the Sea never happened; the Ocean was still unchanged at 1.0. Part of Cult of the Wolf survived as the Frost Caves Update of March 2022 (GamesRadar).

11:34 From then on the studio refused to give dates. In mid-2021 Törnqvist framed the rest of early access around the biome count: five finished, nine planned, "so just that portion of the game is still not there". The rhythm that followed, one biome roughly every eighteen months, each preceded by a public-test branch, held until 1.0.

Major updates (2021–2025)

Each update has its own page; the table gives the live-branch release only. Version numbers follow Iron Gate's 0.major.patch scheme (Valheim Wiki version history; Steam news hub).

14:27 Hearth & Home, the only survivor of the original roadmap, arrived on Sep 16, 2021. In the studio's fireside chat that week the team walked through its central change, a food system that made each meal a choice between health and stamina rather than a flat bonus.

4:50 Mistlands was already the named "next" update in September 2021 but took another fifteen months. The Mistlands biome had existed as a placeholder since launch; the December 2022 update filled it and, with Eitr and staves, added the game's first magic system. The Ashlands followed the same pattern in 2024.

0:02 Ashlands was developed more openly than its predecessors, as Smårs had promised on the Xbox launch day: Iron Gate posted work-in-progress screenshots and ran a "Making the Ashlands" video series in which community manager Josefin, art lead Robin Eyre and Smårs discussed item progression months before the public test opened on Apr 22, 2024. Producer Andreas Tomasson billed the update as "the last major update before the final batch of content when the game reaches 1.0" (Massively Overpowered).

Console ports and cross-play (2022–2026)

14:37 Iron Gate kept its own team on the PC game and contracted the ports out. Xbox and Microsoft Store versions were announced at Microsoft's June 2022 showcase and built by Piktiv (Wikipedia also credits Fishlabs); Smårs explained the join-code cross-play behind them on the Xbox launch day. The milestones were the cross-play patch 0.211.7 on Sep 27, 2022, PC Game Pass on Sep 29, 2022, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S (in Game Preview, with Game Pass) on Mar 14, 2023, and macOS on Jun 10, 2024 (NME; Wikipedia). Details are on Platforms and System Requirements and Cross-Play.

0:11 PlayStation came last. A trailer narrated by Neil Newbon as one of the Forsaken announced a PlayStation 5 version for 2026 on Sep 16, 2025, again ported by Piktiv so that Iron Gate could "continue to focus on developing the Deep North and 1.0" (Game Informer). A Nintendo Switch 2 version was shown in a Nintendo Direct on Feb 5, 2026 (Iron Gate news). Both launched with 1.0.

The road to 1.0 (2023–2026)

34:27 The order of the endgame was fixed early. In March 2023 Smårs laid it out: Ashlands, then the Deep North, "then it will be the full 1.0 release", with no date because "we can just work on it until we feel that this is done".

3:27 In a June 2025 interview Eyre and Tomasson said the team was "very, very much focused on Deep North and the combat update and everything in between", declined to plan beyond an ending, and, asked whether a big update was coming in November or December 2025, answered no. The combat rework shipped as Call to Arms on Sep 9, 2025, one year to the day before 1.0, and that "no" pushed the Deep North into 2026.

The 2026 run-up was a sequence of monthly posts rather than a public test. Patch 0.221.10, "Five Years of Valheim", marked the anniversary on Feb 2, 2026 and promised that "2026 is going to be a great year"; hotfix 0.221.12 on Feb 19 was the last early-access build. "Word from the Devs" posts on Mar 25 ("Winter Adventures": deep snow, the shovel, slippery ice), Apr 28 ("Yeah, That's A Drawbridge") and May 28 ("Summoning Our Champions") revealed the biome piece by piece. Patch 0.221.13 reached the public-test branch on May 6 but never went live (Iron Gate news; Steam news feed).

0:00 On Jun 7, 2026 the "1.0 & Deep North" trailer set the date, Sep 9, 2026, for every platform at once, with full cross-play and a price rise from $19.99 to $29.99 at launch (Iron Gate, "Valheim Has A Release Date!"; PC Gamer). Iron Gate closed early access with a booth at Gamescom in Cologne in late August, where a new trailer premiered, and a Aug 20 post, "Almost there", that retired the Build of the Month feature (Iron Gate, "Almost there").

1.0 (September 2026)

7:22 In the studio's retrospective, published two days before launch, the team said what it valued most in 1.0 was not the biome but the pieces that made Valheim "feel like a proper game": an intro cinematic, an ending, and a story that ties the player to Odin. One of them said the ending made them cry the first time they saw it. The content itself, from Kall Fimbulbringer to the Forge of Potential, is summarized on Deep North Update (1.0 Patch Notes).

0:00 Valheim 1.0 released on Wednesday, Sep 9, 2026 at 6 AM PDT / 15:00 CEST on every platform at once, the same build everywhere with no public test beforehand; existing owners received it free, and the version is simply "1.0". The launch-day Steam concurrent peak passed 115,000 within hours according to SteamDB, well short of the 2021 record, and reviews averaged 89 on Metacritic (Iron Gate, "Valheim 1.0 Has Arrived!"; Beebom; Metacritic).

8:07 Iron Gate has described what comes next only in general terms: bug fixes and quality of life, no Valheim 2, but a wish to make more Valheim, as Eyre and Tomasson told PCGamesN at Gamescom (PCGamesN). The studio is still in Skövde, with eight people on the game and Coffee Stain holding a 30 per cent stake. Or, as the retrospective puts it: the end of the early-access journey "but the start of the next book".

The first month after launch went to fixes. Six patches, from hotfixes 1.0.10 and 1.0.12 on Sep 11 to 1.0.17 on Oct 6, 2026, repaired bugs, improved performance and made small changes such as a one-key dodge; from 1.0.14 on, each reached Steam first and the other platforms a few days later (Patches Since 1.0). Meanwhile the player count kept climbing: SteamDB recorded 308,477 concurrent Steam players on the first weekend, the most since March 2021 (Addicting Games). On Sep 30 Iron Gate promised "more content updates" without naming them, and announced a comic book and concerts for 2027 (Iron Gate, Word from the Devs: What a Month!).

Timeline

Frequently asked questions

How long was Valheim in early access? Five years and seven months, from Feb 2, 2021 to the Valheim 1.0 Release on Sep 9, 2026.

What was Valheim called before? Fejd, Swedish for a feud or vendetta. Richard Svensson began it under that name in 2017 and released it as a free alpha on itch.io in June 2018; Coffee Stain Publishing revealed it publicly as Valheim on Jun 13, 2020.

Why was Valheim's 2021 roadmap canceled? Because the studio was not prepared for several million players. In a Steam post of Jun 10, 2021 Iron Gate said bug fixing and stability had consumed the spring and that it could not deliver four updates that year, so the roadmap was taken down. Only Hearth & Home shipped as planned; Ships & the Sea never happened, and part of Cult of the Wolf survived as the Frost Caves Update.

How many major updates did Valheim get? Seven named ones between 2021 and 2025 (Hearth & Home, Frost Caves, Mistlands, Hildir's Request, Ashlands, The Bog Witch and Call to Arms) followed by the Five Years of Valheim anniversary patch of February 2026 and then 1.0.

Will there be a Valheim 2? No. Eyre and Tomasson told PCGamesN at Gamescom that there will not be a sequel, but that the studio wants to make more Valheim; its stated plans after 1.0 were bug fixes and quality-of-life work, and on Sep 30, 2026 it added that more content updates are coming, without saying what.

Sources

• Valheim, Wikipedia
• Press, Iron Gate Studio
• About, Iron Gate Studio
• Version history, Valheim Wiki (weirdgloop)
• Word from the Devs: What a Month!, Iron Gate Studio, Sep 30, 2026
• Patch 1.0.17, Iron Gate Studio, Oct 6, 2026
• Valheim Just Hit Its Second-Highest Player Count, Addicting Games, Sep 15, 2026
• Valheim news feed, Steam
• Norse survival sim Valheim coming from Coffee Stain Studios, PCGamesN, Jun 13, 2020
• Valheim updates, Mistlands, roadmap, and more, PCGamesN
• 'Valheim' Hearth and Home update has been delayed to Q3 2021, NME, June 2021
• Valheim Hearth and Home update postponed, Iron Gate to remove roadmap, Tech Times, Jun 11, 2021
• Valheim Frost Cave guide, GamesRadar
• Valheim patch adds full cross-play support ahead of Game Pass debut, NME, Sep 28, 2022
• Valheim brings the Ashlands update to its public test server, Massively Overpowered, Apr 22, 2024
• Hit Viking survival game Valheim is finally coming to PS5 next year, Game Informer, Sep 16, 2025
• Patch 0.221.10 – Five Years of Valheim, Iron Gate Studio, Feb 2, 2026
• Valheim is coming to Switch 2!, Iron Gate Studio, Feb 5, 2026
• Word From the Devs: Winter Adventures, Iron Gate Studio, Mar 25, 2026
• Word From the Devs: Yeah, That's A Drawbridge, Iron Gate Studio, Apr 28, 2026
• Valheim Has A Release Date!, Iron Gate Studio, Jun 7, 2026
• Word from the Devs: Almost there…, Iron Gate Studio, Aug 20, 2026
• Valheim 1.0 Has Arrived!, Iron Gate Studio, Sep 9, 2026
• Valheim finally hits 1.0 after five years in early access | interview, GamesBeat, Sep 8, 2026
• There won't be a Valheim 2, but there will be more Valheim, Iron Gate says, PCGamesN, Sep 6, 2026
• The success of Valheim and the people behind it all, Embracer Group, 2021
• Valheim: (Y)OUR JOURNEY, Iron Gate Studio, Sep 7, 2026