The development of Valheim is a bit on the slow side but I'll echo an earlier comment and say that this is a 20$ game that had more than 20$ worth of content in it at the start. But that maybe has less impact on overall popularity than other factors like difficulty level and how punishing the game is on mistakes. many players think that they are getting into a more casual game than Valheim is. It does't hold your hand at all and many folks are only one bad death away from finding another game