V Rising was Steam’s best-selling game during launch week, reaches top five most played

V Rising was in the news throughout last week. It launched in early access on Tuesday, May 17, and it quickly began selling like hotcakes and climbing the Steam charts. V Rising passed 500,000 copies sold just days after launch, and the trend continued — it was the best-selling Steam game for that whole week.

The news comes from SteamDB, which aggregates data on Steam game sales and player counts. According to a new tweet, V Rising took the crown, as well as the #5 spot — Steam counts different versions of games as separate products, so the V Rising Founder’s Pack is listed in addition to the standard game. The rest of the top five contains some usual suspects. Valve’s own Steam Deck, which only just wrestled the top spot away from Elden Ring, was in second place, while Elden Ring itself was in fourth. The #3 spot went to Arma Reforger, which also recently launched in early access.

For V Rising developer Stunlock Studios, there’s more than just sales numbers to celebrate — the game’s player count is growing too. As of the time of this writing, it’s reached the #5 spot on Steam’s most-played list (also tallied by SteamDB). The last time we checked in, it was at #7 with about 100,000 concurrent players. Now it’s risen two spots and reached a new concurrent player peak of just over 150,000. It’s an early access success story, one that’s still very much being written.

If you’re looking to hop on the V Rising bandwagon yourself, we have plenty of guides to help you get started. First and foremost, you’ll need to know how blood works. There are many different types in the game, in addition to related crafting materials like Greater Blood Essence. You can collect those by lonesome if you choose to play V Rising in single-player, but it’s more fun to invite friends to your session.