$15.74. That’s the price of a vampire empire right now, and the Steam Top Sellers chart shows exactly what happens when you get the math right.

V Rising sits at #6 on Steam’s Top Sellers as of May 19, 2026, riding a 55% discount that drops it from $34.99 and a free weekend that ran May 14–18. The numbers: 9,631 concurrent players, a “Very Positive” rating across 65,442 reviews, and 90% of those reviews positive. This is not a game clinging to relevance. This is a game running a clinic on long-tail multiplayer survival.

The Review Score That Shouldn’t Be Taken for Granted

Ninety percent positive across 65,442 reviews deserves scrutiny. Steam’s review system eats survival games alive. The genre attracts players who will torch a rating over balance changes, server wipes, or perceived developer silence. Palworld, Valheim, Rust — all have bled percentage points to review storms.

V Rising has held the line. Of its 65,442 reviews, 58,578 are positive and just 6,864 negative. That’s not a launch-week bubble from Early Access hype — it’s a sustained approval rating across two years of updates, balance patches, and the full 1.0 release in May 2024. According to Game World Observer, the game was already at 88% positive from 67,000 reviews back in February 2024. It has since climbed to 90%. Improving your review percentage after launch is rare. Doing it while passing 65,000 total reviews is almost unheard of.

The top player reviews point to what’s landing. One player with 415.4 hours calls the game “extremely well put together,” noting that “combat and progression feels great, while base building is just expressive enough to make some really nice builds.” Even the joke reviews carry serious playtime behind them. When fewer than 11% of your reviews are negative after 65,000 verdicts, the core experience is doing work.

The Free Weekend Conversion Play

Stunlock timed this with precision. The free weekend ran May 14–18, giving newcomers four full days to explore the world of Vardoran. Polygon flagged V Rising as the top pick among five free Steam games for the weekend. The 55% sale runs through May 21 — three extra days for hooked free-trial players to pull the trigger at a discount. DLC sits at 20% off. The Complete Edition Bundle stacks another 20% on top.

Layer the promotions. Give them the taste. Make the price feel like a steal.

Those 9,631 concurrent players represent a healthy multiplayer population for a game in its second year post-launch. V Rising peaked at over 150,000 concurrent after its Early Access debut in May 2022, according to Game World Observer. No survival game sustains that peak. But nearly 10,000 players on a Monday in May 2026? That’s a live ecosystem, not a ghost town.

Two Discounts, Two Philosophies

Reportedly, the Top Sellers board also features the Devil May Cry Franchise Pack at #10, slashed 84% off. Two very different strategies on the same chart.

The DMC pack bundles single-player games from Capcom’s back catalog. At 84% off, Capcom is trading per-unit revenue for pure volume — a clean play for a finished product with zero server costs or live-service obligations. The bundle has no user reviews of its own. It’s a SKU, not a community.

V Rising’s 55% is more surgical. Stunlock needs warm bodies in its multiplayer world. A deeper discount floods servers with two-hour tourists who inflate concurrency but drag down the review average. The 55% mark converts free-weekend players without cheapening the product.

The Quiet Postscript

There’s a bittersweet undercurrent here. In Dev Update #32, Stunlock confirmed that no new content is in development for V Rising. The studio is building a new game set in the same gothic universe — described as its “most ambitious project” in 15 years. The upcoming Patch 1.1.1, with its granular balance tweaks to abilities like Sanguine Coil and Corrupted Blood, shows the team still cares about the live game. But the content arc — the “journey to Dracula,” as Stunlock puts it — is finished.

V Rising has sold over 5 million copies, according to a studio press release. So this sale isn’t building toward anything. It’s sustaining what’s already there — and doing it with the kind of numbers most multiplayer survival games can only post at launch.

Sources