Warhammer: Vermintide 2’s biggest expansion to date, Winds of Magic, arrived last month and it looks like it’s brought some big player numbers to developer Fatshark’s co-op action game. In an interview with PCGamesN at Gamescom, studio founder and CEO Martin Wahlund talked to us about the expansion’s reception – and a big concurrent user peak it’s achieved.
On the topic of players’ response to Winds of Magic, Wahlund said “it’s a mixed one. I mean, we’re very happy because it’s been the biggest peak of concurrent users, and we’ve sustained it for, like, I think it’s two weeks now. It’s the longest high peak of users.” This new peak, according to Wahlund, was around 14.8k, at the time of interview.
He said the peak was “14.8, or something like, thousand users. I think we were at, like, three or four thousand before that, so it’s been good.” According to Steam Charts, the number of concurrent Vermintide 2 players did indeed see a big rise to nearly 14.8k in August, the month of Winds of Magic’s release – the peak hit 14,754, up from 4,574 the month before. While it’s not the highest number of peak players the game’s seen since its launch in March last year, looking at Steam Charts’ graph, it does appear to be the longest sustained high peak of players so far.
In talking about this, Wahlund touched upon changes the studio has been making to the game and player feedback. He said “I think we did some changes to core game mechanics during the summer that didn’t land with experienced, hardcore players. We have reverted most of them now but I think there’s some people that feel like it’s changed the gameplay they loved, so we’ve tried to make sure that that’s not the case.”
He also said “we added some new mechanics but we really want to make it so people can recognise the game they play and they have the same feeling.”
“We’re looking really much around what we can do – because we want to work with the community. They’re great, they’re really passionate, and we appreciate that, so it’s good.”
This follows the big sales numbers Vermintide 2 saw after its release, having sold more than half a million copies less than a week after launch, and breaking the six figures milestone in sales after just five weeks. It also “outsold, in terms of revenue, the lifetime revenue of the original Vermintide, and on PC only,” Wahlund told PCGamesInsider last year.