Key facts
- Cheapest right now
- € Standard · Europe · Kinguin
- Live offers
- 31 offers · 15 stores
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If Valheim has been sitting on your wishlist, this week brought one piece of news you wanted and one you probably didn't. Iron Gate took its Viking survival game out of early access on 9 September, after more than five and a half years, and used the 1.0 launch to raise the price for new buyers from $19.99 to $29.99, a 50% increase. Steam now sells it for €29.99 with no fees, where our records had €19.99 as its normal price until this summer.
Anyone who already owns it pays nothing and gets the new content free. Everyone else has a simpler decision to make: pay now, or hold on for a discount.
What the 1.0 release adds
The main addition is Deep North, the last biome the studio had planned for the game. On the same day Valheim also launched on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2, with cross-play between platforms.
Players came back in large numbers. Our Steam player tracker, which takes a reading roughly every 15 minutes, had Valheim at daily peaks of between 20,000 and 34,000 in late August and the first week of September (33,968 on 7 September). Launch day pushed it to 168,093, and on 10 September at 19:23 UTC, or 20:23 UK time, it reached 190,713. At 05:38 UTC the following morning there were still 79,241 people playing, which made it the eighth most-played game on Steam at that moment.
Steam reviews are Very Positive, with 433,805 positive out of 461,495.
Where Valheim is cheapest today
We have 27 live offers from 12 stores for the PC version, 17 of them Steam keys and 9 Steam gifts. The cheapest Steam key is at G2A: €19.31 with fees (€19.24 before fees) using the coupon GCKG2AU1M4D. That's 36% below what Steam charges.
K4G comes next at €20.40 with fees. At first glance it looks like the better deal, because its price before fees is €18.09, yet the payment fee it adds at checkout takes it past G2A. It's a good example of why we compare what you actually pay rather than the figure a store shows first.
If you prefer a Steam gift, a copy you accept straight into your Steam library, the cheapest is at Gamivo for €24.11 with fees. Every store and format for PC is on our buy Valheim key page. We don't have any offers for the PS5 or Switch 2 versions.
How cheap Valheim was before the price rise
Our history is what makes waiting tempting. Looking only at Steam keys, with prices before fees, the median is €10.57 and the lowest we've recorded is €8.49. Of the 580 days with a key price in our data, 569 were cheaper than today. Steam itself dropped it to €9.99 in its sales at the end of June and in July, half of the €19.99 it cost back then.
All of that happened at the old price, though.
Resellers had started moving before 1.0 came out. Taking the lowest price of each month across every format, again before fees, April sat at €9.99, May at €8.88, June at €9.98 and July at €9.03. The August minimum was still €10.79, but the average for the month climbed to €19.75. So far in September the average is €23.42.
Our reading of those figures, and it is a reading rather than a certainty, is that with Steam at €29.99 there's little reason for resale copies to drop back to spring levels unless a Steam sale pulls everything down with it. The full history is on our Valheim prices page.
Upcoming Steam sale dates
These are the confirmed dates in our Steam sales calendar for the rest of the season:
- Autumn Sale: 1 to 8 October
- Halloween sale: 26 October to 2 November
- Winter Sale: 17 December to 4 January
We don't know whether Valheim will be discounted in any of them. Purely as a hypothetical: if Steam applied the same 50% it used to at the old price, the game would cost €14.99 there, no fees, which is €4.32 less than the cheapest Steam key today.
Should you buy now or wait?
If you want to get into Deep North while player numbers are at their highest, there's little to gain by waiting. The G2A key at €19.31 with fees is the lowest price available right now and saves you €10.68 compared with Steam.
If you're happy to wait, the Autumn Sale starts on 1 October, less than three weeks away. There's no guarantee Valheim will be in it, and the €9.99 deals from the summer belong to the old price, so decide now what you'd be willing to pay. The price alert on the game page can keep an eye on it for you: set that figure and you'll get a notice when an offer reaches it.
I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember, and for the last 14 years I have been making life easier for other gamers. CEO and co-founder of Gocdkeys.
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