V Rising came out on May 18, and I’d bet almost none of you would ever hear about it that day. A week later, more than 500,000 copies have been sold, and as I write this, more people are playing it 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 this you will have to endure, is a vampire game that is a bit of another game gathered in one. There’s some Diablo there. But also a bit of base building. Some survival stuff. Adventures in an open world. And it supports cooperative mode, but also competitive multiplayer. Oh, and it’s still in early access.
It’s a mixed bag, then, but these are all exactly the kind of games that PC-focused gamers go crazy for, so enter the fact that it has some fantastic splashed art and a relatively cheap price and maybe it’s not. the biggest surprise of this, just one week after its release, 127,000 people have played V Rising on Steam today, placing it in sixth place across the platform, just behind big online fans like Counter-Strike and Destiny .
However, it seems like it was a surprise to the people who made the game. “I didn’t expect so many people,” Jeremy Fielding of Stunlock told IGN. “I don’t think anyone expected it to be that big.” Well, buddy, that’s right. There were over 50,000 people playing the game just hours after its release, and its all-time simultaneous record on Steam is over 150,000 players.
(I’ll add here that the Stunlocks are hardly the first, or unknown of the initial success on Steam, after they released Battlerite a few years ago to similar headlines, so they may not have been completely surprised)
You can watch the game on Steam here. And since I’ve seen a lot of people asking this, even though there’s multiplayer, you don’t need it to play and enjoy the game, as it works like a single player experience. Hopefully we have some impressions of the game after spending some more time later this week!