Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has been working on Stardew Valley for 12 years, and he might just have another 50 in him.
Despite having announced Haunted Chocolatier back in 2021, Barone talks about Stardew Valley like it's still very much his baby. He confessed in December that he just can't "let go" of Stardew Valley "to work on something that isn’t already established and meaningful to people," which certainly does make a lot of sense. The farming sim phenomenon is one of the most successful indie games of all time, and with Barone as its sole developer, well, you can probably imagine he's living pretty comfortably thanks exclusively to Stardew Valley.
Speaking to NPR, he assured fans he's nowhere near done with Stardew despite his admission that "a game can have too much content."
"I ultimately want Stardew Valley to be the best game it can be," Barone said. "So if I feel like it's starting to become kind of overwhelmed with content to the point where it's detrimental to the game's entertainment factor, I would stop at that point.
"I do want to make more than one game in my life. Including the development time, I've been working on Stardew Valley for over 12 years now. But I don't want to definitively say that the book is ever closed, because I think I will always have a desire to come back and maybe add a thing or two. You know, maybe even 50 years from now, I might add something."
This isn't the first time Barone has suggested he'll work on Stardew Valley for the rest of his life, but it sounds to me like he'll eventually taper off development and periodically drop new updates here and there. I would also be willing to bet the success of Haunted Chocolatier will be a huge determiner in how robustly he continues developing Stardew Valley.
"I like creating things," he said. "I don't think I'm ever going to retire. I think it would be funny to release an update when I'm, like, 90 years old — if I live that long. Let's hope."
I went into Aloft expecting a Stardew Valley meets Studio Ghibli experience, but I left impressed by its whimsical take on the survival genre instead.
