Who knew a farming and life simulator could be this popular? Of course, if you’ve ever played Stardew Valley the answer to that question is obvious. It’s so engaging and fun to play and rammed full of stuff to do that it’s easy to forget the game is made by just one guy: Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone.
Mr. ConcernedApe has updated the official Stardew Valley website with some new sales figures, and they are impressive: the game has managed to sell over 41 million copies.
Mr. Ape breaks the data down a little for us, saying that 24 million sales have been on PC, and 7.9 on the Nintendo Switch. Sadly, he doesn’t mention other platforms, so all we know is that roughly 9 million sales have occurred on PlayStation, Xbox and mobile.
What’s really crazy is that in February of 2024, Mr. Concerned told us that Stardew Valley had hit 30 million sales, so between then and now another 11 million copies of the game have been sold. Part of that success was probably the massive 1.6 update that occurred in March. Before that, the game typically had anywhere from 10,000-50,000 concurrent players per day, which is already quite impressive. Following the update, though, the game broke its own records, hitting a peak concurrent player count of 236,614. Since then, Stardew Valley has consistently been getting over 100,000 concurrent players per day.
It also helps that the 1.6 update, like all other updates for the game, was completely free. Mr. SlightlyWorriedSimian remains steadfast in his refusal to charge for DLC or updates, even swearing it on his family honour.
He is currently working on a new game titled Haunted Chocolatier, but in April of 2023 he announced he was taking a break from it to work on Stardew Valley some more.