At some point, the Stardew Valley updates have to end, right? Creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has been working on it since 2011, and continually updating it since it launched in 2016. He's also working on a new game, Haunted Chocolatier. So surely the end is in sight. Except, it doesn't look like it is.
"I have so many ideas for Stardew," Barone told Nintendo Life. "I feel like I could work on it for the rest of my life, and just keep improving it, adding more stuff to it, more content, fleshing out the existing content."
The fans are a big part of what's keeping him working on Stardew. And there are a lot of them. 35 million copies have been sold, around half of them on PC. And while massively popular games can sometimes inspire a sense of entitlement or toxicity from some corners of their communities, Stardew seems to have largely avoided this.
"Stardew, somehow, even though it's gotten very popular, still kind of has this really small indie feel to it," Barone said, "like the community, the game itself, how people think about the game." So he wants to keep making new things and sharing them with the millions of players hungry for more.
"I feel like I want to keep it alive, keep it fresh, delight the fans, because it's just fun to engage with that," he said. "It's a rare opportunity I have that there's so many people who love this game and will play whatever update I make. And what I love to do is create things and then share them with people and give people experiences. And Stardew is such a good platform for that because it is very popular and it's still really active."
Of course, this is easier said than done considering that he's also developing Haunted Chocolatier. "It's kind of hard," he said. "I don't want to see it fizzle out, I want to keep it alive, but then I also want to make a new game."
It's a lot when you also consider the fact that Barone is a solo developer—though he does get help with the Stardew updates these days, "mostly on the coding," he says.
If the updates do eventually stop rolling in, it doesn't look like it's going to be any time soon. And even then, we'll still have the game's diligent army of modders to keep new things coming.
