Five and a half years is a long time to stay in Early Access, but Iron Gate is closing that chapter tomorrow. On September 9, 2026, Valheim officially hits version 1.0 — leaving the Steam Early Access tag behind for good, alongside a console expansion and a price increase that only applies to new buyers.

From a two-person side project to 17 million copies

Valheim’s origin story is small by design. Co-founder Richard Svensson started building the game as a solo side project in late 2018, and fellow Iron Gate co-founder Henrik Törnqvist joined in mid-2019 to help finish it. The studio grew to just five people for most of development, a team size that makes what happened next look even more improbable.

Valheim entered Steam Early Access on February 2, 2021, and sold a million copies in its first eight days, then five million within a month. It never really slowed down: Iron Gate and publisher Coffee Stain Publishing now say the game has surpassed 17 million lifetime copies sold, still sitting around a 94% “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating across a Steam review base that’s grown to hundreds of thousands of write-ups.

What Deep North actually adds

The 1.0 release ships with Deep North, the game’s final planned biome, following the Ashlands in the progression chain. Where the Ashlands is scorched and hostile, Deep North is built around ice sheets at the coastline and dense, snow-buried forests further inland — dotted with abandoned villages where ghosts of the original inhabitants still wander. It’s the last major content drop Iron Gate has committed to before the game is considered content-complete, closing out a roadmap that also delivered the Mistlands and Ashlands biomes during Early Access.

A first-ever PlayStation release, and a price hike

Two platform milestones land with 1.0. Valheim is coming to PS5 for the first time — the game previously skipped PlayStation entirely, having only reached consoles via Xbox and Xbox Game Pass back in March 2023. It’s also debuting on Nintendo Switch 2, giving Iron Gate’s game a release footprint across every current platform for the first time since launch.

The other change is less welcome for latecomers: Valheim’s price rises from $19.99 to $29.99, a 50% increase, the moment 1.0 goes live. Iron Gate and Coffee Stain have been clear that the jump only hits new purchases — anyone who already owns the game keeps it at no extra cost, and the new price was announced well in advance, at the PC Gaming Show back in June.

Why it matters beyond one game

Valheim leaving Early Access is a useful data point for how long survival-crafting games can stay in active development without losing their audience — and for how far a genuinely small team can stretch a hit before needing to scale up. Iron Gate spent over five years shipping biome-sized content updates instead of rushing a 1.0 tag, and the numbers suggest that patience paid off rather than costing the studio momentum. It’s also a reminder that “Early Access” as a label doesn’t mean small: Valheim has been outselling plenty of full-priced AAA releases for years while technically still labeled unfinished.

---

Valheim’s trajectory is part of a bigger pattern this year — indie games are having their best year ever on Steam, but the market is increasingly winner-take-all, with a handful of breakout hits pulling in the bulk of the revenue. For more on how the industry’s money is splitting between hits and everyone else, see the industry’s record-revenue, record-layoffs paradox.