V rising came out on May 18th, and I’d bet almost none of you would have heard of it that day. A week later it has sold over 500,000 copies and as of this writing it is being played by more people on Steam than elden ring.
So what is V rising? It’s a vampire game where you can create your own character and fight. More specifically – and you have to agree with me on this – it’s a vampire game that’s a bit of a lot of other games rolled into one. There are Diablo there. But also some base building. Some survival stuff. Adventures in an open world. And it supports co-op, but also competitive multiplayer. Oh, and it’s still in Early Access.
So it’s a mixed bag, but these are also all the very kinds of games that PC-centric gamers are wild for, so throw in the fact that it has cool splash art and a relatively cheap price point, and maybe it is That’s not the biggest surprise, just a week after launch, 127,000 people played V rising on Steam today, which puts it at #6 across the platform, behind only juggernaut online stars like counterstrike and determination.
However, it apparently came as a surprise to the people actually making the game. “I absolutely didn’t expect so many people,” says Jeremy Fielding of developer Stunlock told IGN. “I don’t think anyone expected it to be this big.” Well, mate, that’s it. There were over 50,000 people playing the game within hours of its release, and the all-time record on Steam is over 150,000 players.
(I add here that Stunlock are hardly newbies here or alien to initial success on Steam, have released Battlerite a few years ago to similar headlinesso maybe they weren’t total surprised)
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You can watch the game on Steam here. And because I’ve seen a lot of people asking this, although there is multiplayer, you don’t need it at all to play and enjoy the game as it works well as a single player experience. We’ll hopefully have some impressions of the game later this week after we’ve spent some more time with it!
