Maybe It's Time For ConcernedApe To Let Go Of Stardew Valley

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was released in 2016, but solo developer Eric “” Barone had already worked on it for over four and a half years before it saw the light of day. Initially 🌺conceptualised as a fan-made alternative to the Story of Seasons games, the final product was released in February 2016 and went on to become one of the best-selling video games of all time, an incrediblဣe feat for a solo developer. Stardew Valley is considered by many to be one of the best video games ever made, and Barone has been updating the game regularly to this day.

I think it’s time for him to let it go.

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It’s not my place to decide if the game is finished or not, or if it deserves to be left as is – as the sole developer, and the person who knows most what a ‘completed’ Stardew would look like, that’s up to Barone. But as I’ve written before, I find it v෴ery concerning how often the creators of breakout hits end up working on a single game indefinitely in order to keep prov🐽iding new content for its loyal audience. We end up seeing games become pseudo-live service titles, updated over and over with new content and expansions with no end in sight.

Stardew Valley is, to some extent, engaging in this practice. While this isn’t inherently negative, I do feel that the normalising of infinite free updates is a bad thing. It would be disingenuous to imply that the player base has no impact on a developer’s decision to continue expanding and updating a game, because🙈 of course players exert pressure on developers for new content. Stardew Valley’s core audience, while relatively tame, is loyal to a fault. New content gives them a reason to keep playing, and that continued interest draws new players in.

As a solo developer working with a single other designer, Barone is in 🐓complete control of the pace and scope of updates, giving him agency to stop if he wants to for any reason. This isn’t always the case for other devs, who may end up stuck on a single project for years.

But when you look at the wider industry, it’s clear that because so many surprise successes have updated their games for free over long periods of time, players expect this to be the default for developers. It shouldn’t be. Maintaining a game at this level requires work, and work should be paid. Far be it from me to tell developers how to monetise their games, but it’s not fair to expect every studio that makes an awesome game to provide free expansions and updates for the next decade. The practice is so prevalent and deep-rooted that players are even 168🐟澳洲幸运5开奖网:begging the studio toཧ stop doing exactly this. New players wiꦏll inevitabl🅺y join the update, but free updates and expansions inevitably serve an ingrained audience where the returns are diminished.

Stardew’s case feels especially prescient because, again, Barone is a solo developer. He is not only working on Stardew Valley full-time, but also developing the highly-anticipated Haunted Chocolatier. That game was announced in 2021 and still has no projected release date, and really, who can blame him? Barone has said that he’s eager to work on it again but won’t do so until the newest Stardew Valley update is bug-freꦑe on all platforms, meaning it has to be working well on PC, mobile, and cons𝓰ole. At the time of writing V🗹ersion 1.6 is only available on PC.

Maintaining a game pretty much on your own is hard, but doing that while developing another is harder. I wonder – if there wasn’t a set expectation of games growing indefinitely after release, would Stardew Valley still have the same updates and additions? Without that pressure to expand, would we be closer to playing Haunted Ch🌊ocolatier? I can’t answer that question, but I can say that developers deserve to work on the projects they’re most passionate about instead of the projects they’re best known for. It’s been eight years – Barone has done more than enough.