In a recent interview, Stardew Valley developer Eric Barone reveals the hit indie farming simulator has already sold almost a half a million copies.
Released a mere two weeks ago, Stardew Valley has been very well received, with over 8000 reviews on Steam aggregating to an Overwhelmingly Positive rating. The figure was mentioned during an interview with PCGamer’s Tom Marks as they discussed the game’s success, with Barone disclosing that about 425,000 copies have been sold over both GOG and Steam in the course of twelve days.
Despite the fanbase that has been building since he first began blogging about the development process of Stardew Valley, Barone says the popularity of the game, which he’d started as a project to teach himself how to code, has surprised him, and that’d he figured there would be crossover fans from similar games but not to this extent:
“I thought it would be popular with people who were fans of Harvest Moon or Rune Factory, and I thought that would pretty much be it. I never expected it to have such wide appeal. I mean, I’m super happy about it and I’m blown away by the reaction, but I’m surprised too.”
As Marks points out, not a lot of games on Steam pull those kinds of numbers; in 2015 only six games on Steam sold over one million copies, a mixture of AAA hits and Early Access fan favorites. The “open-ended country-life RPG”, which released in full on February 26, has already received content updates adding new items and adjusting gameplay features while issuing several bug fixes. In that short time Barone has also earned himself goodwill with players for his dedication to fans.
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