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Indie games have been finding huge success across a number of different platforms as many indie developers are pushing the boundaries on successful launches – smaller developers have been doing extremely well in the mobile space for the longer period of time as different genres have been pulling in big numbers, the latest push has been within the gambling industry as a good example of smaller developers pushing games to wider numbers despite initiatives such as Gamstop change participation options – but the latest big indie release doesn’t come on mobile, but to the PC instead.
(Image from gameskinny.com)
This weekend saw the release of Valheim, the newest edition to the survival games genre with a big focus on building and resource gathering by combining some extra interests through the addition of skills and skill levelling – other games in the market such as Minecraft and Rust have been finding renewed or ongoing success with huge player numbers, and Valheim was able to hit records this weekend on popular platform Steam hitting numbers that beat out big games like PUBG and GTA with over 350,000 concurrent players at the height, and reaching over a million sales too.
The game is still in quite an early alpha state, so players are experiencing some bugs and other small issues, but that was to be expected from a smaller studio and an indie game to boot, but it does also show changing attitudes towards some games too as indie games as a whole have been performing extremely well and passing over the shortcomings found in recent triple A titles. With a big roadmap laid out too and not so much as a mention around microtransactions or other in-game purchases, it’s a title that certainly looks to be breaking the mould in modern gaming where it seems to be a trend in many of the recent releases.
What it does show, more than anything, however, is that these more simplistic games that perhaps focus more on substance over style are very much trending right now – especially when compared to big recent releases like Cyberpunk which look visually stunning, but many feels had something missing. It has been the simple approach, although with depth, that has been the most successful part of the game and may provide an opportunity for developers moving forward that modern gaming is more than just pretty looks and expected features, but that there’s a huge number looking for more too.