V Rising Dev Reacts to Huge Early Success: “I Don’t Think Anybody Expected it to Be Quite This Big”
It’s hard to explain a vampire-themed online base-building competitive open world survival action RPG. That’s why, for V Rising developer Stunlock Studios, the priority was to let people play as soon as possible.
Since launching through Steam Early Access on May 17, in a notably complete state, V Rising has grown in popularity day after day. It hit close to 50,000 players within a few hours of being released, and as of May 23, has a 24-hour peak of more than 150,000. For context, more people have played V Rising today than the Steam versions of Grand Theft Auto V or Elden Ring.
“I absolutely did not expect this many people”, said Stunlock’s community manager Jeremy Fielding just as V Rising hit 80,000 players and sold 500,000 copies overall. “I don’t think anybody expected it to be quite this big.”
V Rising begins with the player, as a fully customisable vampire, waking up after a century-spanning sleep, very weak and in need of blood. But what begins as a survival action game in the vein of Diablo soon turns into a fully open world adventure with base-building, not to mention co-op and versus multiplayer. As a result, it's a sprawling, multi-genre beast that takes in huge swathes of the modern MMO landscape and repurposes them.
Stunlock has been working on V Rising for around three years but only revealed it in May 2021 – and not many people seemed to pay attention. “It’s been a slow ramp-up”, laughed Fielding. “A very small company with a brand new IP? It took a lot of people a long time to start to take notice.”
That changed as soon as they could actually play V Rising. “We really started to get a lot of attention when we went into closed beta, when people really got an opportunity to get their hands on the game,” Fielding
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