Stunlock Studio’s vampire base-building survival, V Rising, is proving to be a stellar hit following the game’s exit from Steam Early Access on May 8. It has now even beaten another indie hit, Hades 2, to become one of Steam’s most-played titles by concurrent player count.
V Rising‘s 1.0 update introduced subtle-yet-substantial changes to the game’s core mechanics and graphics, adding numerous quality-of-life improvements alongside tons of new content. The update introduced a new region, Ruins of Mortium, to its already sprawling world, with new bosses, enemies, and rewards to obtain. The full patch notes include a lot more than can be crammed in a few paragraphs and have been massively successful at attracting new waves of players and elevating itself to a high status on the Steam charts.
The game cracked into Steam’s top 10 with 98,000 concurrent players, which is nearly 20 times its average player count. To put that into perspective, V Rising usually peaks at around 5,000 players on a good day, SteamDB shows. Though it did have a big spike when its 2023 update, Gloomrot, came out, it was nowhere near the 1.0 numbers. The game’s full release is still behind its launch highs, however, which saw over 150,000 players clocking in to enjoy some good old-fashioned vampiric fun.
V Rising launched into Steam Early Access almost two years ago and has seen numerous small updates to its core gameplay over the years. It’s only had two major updates, Gloomrot and the 1.0 release, and is Stunlock’s biggest game to date. They previously tried their luck in the MOBA genre with Battlerite, whose many mechanics, namely the camera movement, feature prominently in V Rising.
The game is available for all players on Steam and the PlayStation 5 and is currently collaborating with Castlevania.
