Are they related news? I dunno, who cares? I mostly can’t be bothered to write more than one post in a day. let’s just say it’s because they’re both indie games.

Current indie darling, Valheim is continuing an unstoppable pace of selling more than a million copies a week, putting them over a staggering 5 million copies sold since Steam launch on February 2. It routinely sits at 2nd or 3rd most played game, and has peaked at over 500,000 simultaneous players. It also sits at the 39th highest rated game on Steam with over 100,000 ‘overwhelmingly positive’ reviews. Pretty remarkable for an early access game in the hands of a tiny 5 person developer.

Meanwhile, the developer of last years’ indie summer blockbuster, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has decided to drop the indie moniker, and has officially sold to Epic Games. Mediatonic promises Fall Guys will remain on all currently available platforms, and will continue with plans to bring the game to Switch and XBox. Time will tell how this will affect the now not-so-small dev in the future, however. It’s pretty safe to say as an Epic brand, any future titles will likely be Epic exclusive, at least on PC.

Perhaps I have paired these two because the significance of indie development and availability is important. I have a very complicated opinion of Epic Games, and I think I share others’ hesitation in considering what the purchase of a developer who has made a game that is available across many platforms, by a publisher recently made famous for platform exclusivity.

I’ll definitely elaborate more on that point in a later post.

/gameon