The whole Early Access release model has a lot of pros and cons to consider, and some argue that the system is prone to abuse by developers and publishers for all sorts of reasons, but at least for Valheim developer Iron Gate, it was essential.

Talking to GamesIndustry, Iron Gate CEO Richard Svensson says Valheim wouldn't have been nearly as successful as it has been without Steam Early Access. "Even if we had an enormous budget and worked on the game in secret for five years up until the launch, we never would have been able to reach the amount of people that we have." says Svensson.

"Having the game out there and being able to work with the live community is really the only way that Valheim would have ever reached the success it has."

While Svensson sees Valheim's Early Access launch as crucial to the game's success, it was only ever released as an Early Access game because Svensson "couldn't afford to keep working on it" and Early Access appeared to be "the only reasonable solution at the time." Obviously, that gamble paid off massively as Valheim is now an undeniable juggernaut of the survival genre with 17 million copies sold as of its 1.0 launch in September 2026.

Still, Valheim was in Early Access for more than five years, which is quite a bit longer than the average 21 months most games take before their 1.0 updates (according to GameDiscoverCo data cited by GI). Svensson says that's because the scope of the project continues to increase every time a new update is released.

"We have also always tried to keep the team relatively small, but even so, the production scale now is gigantic compared to what it was at the time of the Early Access release," he says. "Back then, when we made a new biome, it was basically the same thing with a new coat of paint, but today it's just so much more.

"It's not just about content anymore, and that's what made the development time longer than we first expected."

For my money, Iron Gate and Valheim are perfect examples of Early Access done right. Right from the start, the game was extremely polished and felt representative of the core gameplay loop that still compels me to play to this day – there's just a lot more of it, and with an even higher level of polish. I never felt like I was being duped and communication has always been on point, which can't be said for a lot of other Early Access games that needn't be mentioned here.

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