Valheim’s Hearth & Home update in numbers and graphs

This article looks at Valheim’s long waited update – Hearth & Home and its impact to new and old players.

We’ve previously talked about what led to Valheim’s success during launch. This is more an update what’s happened since.

In short, Valheim’s Hearth & Home update brings back some old players, but doesn’t expand the player base.

Valheim’s quick rise and financial sucess

Valheim launched on the 2nd Feb 2021 and sold 5 million copies in its first month. That was an incredible an unexpected success, especially considering the $19.99 price point.

The growth of sales has slowed significantly since then, having sold about 8m units to date.

You can see our estimates and detailed overview of the game on our Valheim Steam Stats page.

Valheim’s units sold over time

Hearth & Home update brings back old players

Valheim released its long waited new and fairly large update Hearth & Home on 16th September and has since seen a large uptick in active players.

Since its launch, Valheim has settled to a rate of c. 15-20,000 active players playing the game constantly. The new update has pushed that up to 75,000 in Sep 19. This shows that a fair amount of players have come back to try out the new update.

Considering, however, that the total player base of Valheim is c. 8m people and at its launch period it reached 500,000 active players, this is a fraction of its initial success.

We’ve also seen the active player base fade already, to about half of its post-update peak.

Valheim’s average daily active users since launch

The new update has not led to significant increase in sales

Even though old players might have re-joined the game, the release has led to very limited new sales for the game. In fact, it has sold just over 200,000 units in the 15 days post update.

Valheim’s units sold over time

This is an uptick VS the usual 5k units per day Valheim sells. It’s certainly a lot of units for any indie game that’s not Valheim. 200,000 units at $20 is $4m of gross revenue.

But it’s 2.5% of Valheim’s total sales – hardly anything to write home about.

Now I know this update wasn’t probably aimed at driving significant further sales, but more giving it’s core audience more for their money. So let’s see what the impact has been to Valheim’s rating.

Valheim’s reviews post-update

Valheim has been incredibly well received from the beginning, having >95% positive reviews. The update has hardly changed that.

Valheim’s positivie review % over time

There has been a small downtick in reviews if anything, but it’s hardly made any impact.

Muted impact of a long waited update

It seems like Valheim’s update hasn’t really made a significant impact, to anyone. It added more building options and updated how eating and cooking works – hardly anything to get super excited about.

It’s been a long time since Valheim’s launch and it takes a bigger update than this to get people properly excited about again.

Then again, for a small indie dev studio that unexpectedly made over $100m in gross revenue and a game with 95% positive reviews, chasing for more sales or a higher review rating is probably not a priority.

See more Valheim stats or find stats on any other steam game using our Steam data platform – a lot of it is free!