Valheim player count: 105,045 on Steam on Oct. 23, nearly six weeks after a 1.0 peak above 307,000

Valheim is coming down from its biggest run since 2021. Here’s how many people play Iron Gate’s Viking survival game, how far 1.0 lifted it and where it stands on Steam.

How many people play Valheim?

Valheim peaked at 105,045 concurrent players on Steam on Oct. 23, 2026, according to Valve’s most played chart, which ranked it No. 23, down from No. 18 a week earlier. At 4:40 a.m. ET on Oct. 24, 51,093 people were playing it on Steam.

Steam is one storefront. The count leaves out Xbox, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, the Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store, all of which share crossplay with Steam.

Valheim’s record came in its first weeks of early access, which started on Feb. 2, 2021. By August 2026, the month before 1.0, the peak had settled at 30,973. September’s average of 110,174 players at any moment was about seven times August’s 15,759, and the last 30 days held close to that, at 103,859.

How 1.0 lifted Valheim. Iron Gate released Valheim 1.0 on Sept. 9, 2026, with the Deep North biome, the boss Kall Fimbulbringer, more than 40 new weapons and new ports for PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2, as our Valheim 1.0 release date page details. The daily Steam peak jumped from 27,022 on Sept. 8 to 167,999 on launch day and kept climbing for four days, to 307,757 on Sunday, Sept. 13, Valheim’s best day since March 2021.

Each Sunday since has come in lower:

The Oct. 18 peak was about half of Sept. 13. Weekday peaks fell from about 200,000 in late September to 98,264 on Oct. 22, the first day under 100,000 since 1.0, before Valve’s chart logged 105,045 on Oct. 23.

What Iron Gate shipped after 1.0. Iron Gate followed 1.0 with bug-fix patches: hotfixes 1.0.10 and 1.0.12 on Sept. 11, 1.0.14 on Sept. 17, 1.0.15 on Sept. 18, 1.0.16 on Sept. 25, 1.0.17 on Oct. 6 and 1.0.20 on Oct. 15. The latest one targets loot:

• Trophy drop chance rises with a monster’s star level.
• Pseudo-random drop logic no longer resets between sessions, for a fairer spread of rare drops.
• Items and build pieces wrongly flagged as cheated by a bug in the initial 1.0 release get the flag reset.
• A dedicated server no longer runs at an uncapped frame rate when a game client with v-sync runs on the same computer, and Xbox settings save between sessions again.

On Sept. 30, Iron Gate said more content updates are coming without naming them, and that its developer posts will no longer run monthly. Valheim picked up Golden Joystick Awards nominations for Best Multiplayer Game, Best Indie Game and PC Game of the Year, with voting that closed on Oct. 23. Valheim concerts in Stockholm and Paris and Valheim comics are set for 2027.

Valve ranks the chart by its own measure of play, so a game with a higher peak can sit lower, as Rust does here, covered on our Rust player count page. Valheim leads Keen Games' survival game, which reached 1.0 on Oct. 15, as our Enshrouded 1.0 page shows, and Pocketpair’s creature collector, which left early access in July, covered on our Palworld 1.0 patch notes page. For another game riding a big update, see our Helldivers 2 player count page.

This page is updated as soon as Valve’s chart posts Valheim’s Sunday peak or Iron Gate announces its next content update.