Stardew Valley is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, February 26, 2025. Below, we examine how it has remained the leader in a genre it helped to revive.
A decade ago this month, indie developer Eric Barone, better known as ConcernedApe, released his debut game: a farm and life sim called Stardew Valley. Heavily inspired by the Harvest Moon series, Stardew Valley gives players an idyllic sandbox to grow crops, fight slimes, and interact with a couple dozen NPCs. The game was an immediate hit, selling 1 million copies after only a couple months, and it inspired a wave of cozy farming sims that have dominated the indie gaming scene since. Now, 10 years later, the undisputed best game in this massive genre is … Stardew Valley.
PUBG sparked the battle-royale craze before the throne was firmly usurped by Fortnite. Lethal Company innovated with its extraction-based gameplay, only to be improved upon by REPO and Arc Raiders. Hand of Fate gave way to Slay the Spire and Balatro. Yet after a decade of worthy title challengers, from Coral Island to Sun Haven, Stardew has retained its farming-sim superiority, topping both the critics’ lists and sales charts, and shipping a bounty of no less than 50 million copies. It has spawned cookbooks, strategy guides, a board game, and two concert tours. It’s playable on everything from Linux to Teslas. Its appeal stretches beyond the bounds of regular gamers: I know plenty of people whose only game in their Steam account is Stardew. It’s a remarkable tale of resilience, but what makes Stardew so special?
One reason players continue to flock to Pelican Town is the consistent stream of significant updates ConcernedApe provides. Barone added new farms, marriage candidates, buildings, fish, animals, items, events, islands, and more. Big numbered updates initially rolled out roughly annually: 1.1 in 2016 brought new farms and recipes; 1.2 added translations in 2017; 1.3 added multiplayer, the Night Market, and more cutscenes in 2018. The rate of updates slowed down slightly, especially after Barone announced his hotly anticipated, rarely seen second title, Haunted Chocolatier, but they grew in size and scope, leading to massive bundles of content like the most ripe harvest. The total word count of all Stardew updates exceeds Of Mice & Men by a decent margin. There’s still no sign of a Stardew sunset. 2024’s 1.6 update added a DLC-sized area in Ginger Island, with a 1.7 update on the way: ConcernedApe has already confirmed there will be new marriage candidates (I’m hoping for the lovable old salt, Willy). Barone attributes his decade-long dedication to the game’s lasting popularity, reaching heights that make it “hard to just stop improving it when there are still things that can be improved”. While a small team has been aiding ConcernedApe since the 1.3 update, he still handles the entirety of certain departments of development, including music, as it’s necessary to “maintain a full connection” to the game.
If, somehow, these massive updates weren’t enough to keep the game fresh–a massively undeserved label, given Barone could have easily charged an extra 10 bucks for Ginger Island alone–the game has developed a considerable modding community, with massive projects like Stardew Valley Expanded adding even more locations and nearly doubling the number of NPCs, and Downtown Zuzu, which adds the oft-mentioned, seldom-visited city as an explorable location. SVE has reached over 3 million downloads, which would be dream numbers for any other indie game, further showing what a behemoth Stardew has become in the gaming scene.
But Stardew isn’t the only game with years of updates, or a lively modding community. What really makes this title one of the kings of indie gaming, is that after all this time, Stardew is still Stardew. With every update, tweak, and addition, ConcernedApe avoided altering every piece of his masterpiece until it was unrecognizable: a Valley of Theseus bloated into something unfamiliar and unimproved. The gameplay loop is still as casual or complicated as each farmer wants. You can choose to wander around the forest and pick daffodils for your wife all day, or you can optimize your loadout to fight those damn serpents in the lower levels of the Skull Cavern. You can dedicate yourself to decorating the town square every season, or you can run an Ancient Fruit wine empire that turns Pelican Town into a multi-million industrial powerhouse. The characters and storylines still belie the saccharine visuals and chirpy soundtrack.
Stardew has never been afraid to tackle ideas like alcoholism, depression, adultery, and PTSD, which gives the town residents depth beyond their pixels. You start to gift Shane pepper poppers instead of beer, even though there’s no actual benefit to doing so. You happily spend money and resources converting Pam’s trailer into a house, and you side with the town against the megacorp JojaMart, even though Pierre the shopkeeper is a bit of a jerk. These are our friends, and we get to know them a little better with every playthrough and every update. The world is also riddled with secrets–so many that it’s almost impossible to come across them all naturally. I’ve had many conversations on how to get the best hidden weapons, or all the fun things you can do with the mayor’s underwear.
ConcernedApe insists that Haunted Chocolatier is something new, and not a Stardewsequel, which makes sense: Stardewis its own sequel. He has found a way to construct a beautiful sandbox and add more toys without changing how the shovel and pail work. For all the pretenders to the farming-sim throne, both valiant and forgettable, none have truly pushed the genre far enough to entice everyone to abandon this constantly improving, already-incredible juggernaut that keeps us coming back for one more day, one more save. We’ll keep playing Stardewfor another 10 years if it stays fresh and improved, and knowing ConcernedApe, anything is possible.
