‘V Rising’ Huge Success Has Even Surprised Its Developers

'V Rising' (Image: Stunlock Studios)

One week. That’s how long it took the game developed by Stunlock Studios to amass over 1,000,000 sales and climb up every gaming chart possible. It’s a growth that even its developers are surprised by. The name, V Rising, is a survival/PVP game that is holding on to the top five positions on Steam. The game, released on May 18 has seen a steady amount of growth primarily due to its players being surprised by both the cheap price tag and the depth of the game. The game features many layers. V-Rising has aspects of a survival game, an open world, base-building, crafting, PvPvE, solo play, co-op and most recently an offline mode.

The success comes as a surprise to many people including the developers at Stunlock Studios. Community manager Jeremy Fielding remarked, “I absolutely did not expect this many people, I don’t think anybody expected it to be quite this big.” There was a slow buildup to the release of the game, with reports of its development not being released until mid-2021 even though it had been in the works since 2018.

Traction didn’t pick up until the release of the closed beta earlier this year, and its May release saw the number of players skyrocket to about 50,000 within the first couple of hours and its peak at over 150,000 as of this writing.

The concerns remain about the game’s server strength, however. With so many concurrent players, the risks of slow performance and connectivity issues are always present, a problem that Stunlock Studios had faced with their game Battlerite. Fortunately, many of V-Rising‘s servers are player-run. An aspect that Fielding himself says helps with the player load.

Reviews of the game have been largely positive. It has over 14,000 community reviews on Steam, with a largely “Very Positive” ranking. Gaming publication God Is A Geek said, “V Rising could be the next big survival game. Whether you want to play alone, with, or against other players, this has you covered … may be the game you’ve been waiting for.”

For now, Fielding says he’s just enjoying the success of the game, but there are plans to add more in the near future. “I think that when we do get to full release people will really realize what our intention is in this being a fully fleshed-out experience. And then after that, there’s so many things we can still do.’