At this point they should just hold on to all the updates they want to add, and make it a sequel. I love all the things that they’ve added and it’s clearly a piece of passion, but at some point they’re going to need to publish something else
I never thought about it like that. If he makes an average of just $0.50 per sale after all the storefront fees and taxes and stuff, he would still have enough money to pay himself $200,000 a year for an entire lifetime, just from the sales he’s already made. No wonder he’s so chill about keeping the game updated for free. What an awesome guy
I thought $0.50 was low for this math to work out, but turns out 30 million copies of Stardew Valley have been sold, so that’s $15 million, which over 60 years is $250k/year.
Still though I have no clue if $0.50 is normal take home per copy sold for a self published game (it seems low), but I’m very happy he’s doing well for himself and hopes he makes more per copy sold. I’ve bought the game 4 times, so I’m doing my part!
Yeah, I chose $0.50 as an absurdly low assumption, because while the game nominally sells for $15, I don’t know anything about costs involved. A quick google search says his net worth is somewhere around 30-45 million dollars, which is about twice what I estimated. Which most people would use as an excuse to sell the game to Microsoft and retire forever, but Eric Barone is too good for that. I just realized I only own the game on mobile and xbox. Reckon I might buy it on PC next paycheck
Read a book that goes over the development of Stardew written by Jason Schreier and covered Eric a good bit.
The dude was was worth multi millions shortly after Stardew had launched and it hadn’t even occurred to him to buy a new car. Jason hung out with him and watched him climb over the seat to get into the drivers seat of his car because the door was broken. Then at some point Jason asked him how it felt to be a famous developer and Eric basically just said he didn’t care about the fame and actually didn’t want it. He just wanted people to enjoy what he made.
Saying Stardew Valley is a passion for Eric is an understatement. By the time he finished the game, he basically hated working on it. And ever since its launch, he’s worked on it for no reason other than to make a better game.
Eric Barone is a shining light in an industry of constant shame.
He has hired a few contractors to help build out features like co-op, (though the first few versions were entirely him on his own). That would eat into profits a bit, but even if he paid each of them $100k for their work there are few enough for it to be a drop in the bucket
This reminds me of the new game Andrew Gower and his brothers have been working on, Brighter Shores. It’s a pure passion project based on a from scratch game engine that was created to make programming (even massively) multiplayer online games much easier.
The goal isn’t profit but rather, to have fun, and make a cool enjoyable game. He’s said they’ve made more than enough money from the sale of Jagex and RuneScape back in the day (which FWIW, he regrets that sale and a lot of what has happened at Jagex/to RuneScape).
I love to see game developers (and people in general that … “make it” and then go “you know what, I do have enough”).
The cozy-game genre specifically is a relatively recent category, even if there are plenty of older games that could fit into it.
It definitely isn’t a term you would have seen back when Stardew Valley was released.
And then it says the reason that Hades 2 has resource gathering is because stardew valley influenced it…
That’s not how you should read this section of the article.
Though Stardew Valley did not invent the farming genre – and obviously took a lot of inspiration from Harvest Moon – it certainly triggered the avalanche of similar farming games that followed. On top of that, numerous games have farming and other life sim elements in them now, regardless of genre.
“On top of that” phrasing implies they are making a separate point.
Just to add support to your point, it’s literally in The Official Stardew Valley Cookbook that the inspiration comes from Harvest Moon. He’s not at all claiming to have invented anything. ConcernedApe is a humble treasure.
(I just finished reading the cookbook is why I pulled that information from there. I’m sure there’s lots of other places where he said that.)
I tried and failed to dust off Fallout 4. Got hit by bugs, and some of my mods that fix immersion breaking (for me) stuff don’t work either, so I’ll wait.
No mods, on my first clean install, all the Automaton voice lines were missing, so the robots were mute. I did a reinstall, that fixed it, so I only had the rest of the “normal” bugs.
My favourite bug someone just found is that if you build stuff in any of the indoor settlements, like Vault 88, it breaks pathing in subtle ways everywhere. If you put down something, it marks the coordinates in that indoor cell for NPCs to walk around, so that they don’t try to walk over beds and such. The problem is that it actually marks those same coordinates in all cells everywhere, so the bed shaped “no-go zone” is there in every single interior in seemingly random places. That means, the more you build in these places, the less NPCs can walk in indoor cells, and they might get randomly stuck.
BTW the immersion breaking thing for me is that I’ve always hated that unlike previous Fallout games, or like all games ever, when you holster a weapon, it just disappears into thin air instead of being holstered in some way. There is a simple mod that fixes that, but it got broken by the next gen update, which also broke F4SE. So now I wait and play sg else.
That’s not maximum profit, though! They could have created timed content, events, literally anything and would have probably made more money because of the cultural relevance…
Problem is that Dragon’s dogma 2’a save system is pretty unpredictable. It’s autosave can be too aggressive where when you load a last save you might not be able to get out of a bad situation and Last Inn save might be from hours past so you can lose hours of progress, which can severely hamper the exploration. I feel like Inn save must instead be a Camp save, which would have been best of the both worlds.
The author apparently doesn’t know that BG3 (and a lot of other games) has an honour mode that doesn’t allow save scumming, so people can choose to play the exact same way if they want to.
Yeah for these things I think having an option is best. I personally don’t play this way but I can see the appeal. I don’t really see the harm in letting people play how they want to play
Imagine now NPCs in gaming being bound to always being online and a company can choose to turn the cloud computing off for the npcs making the game unplayable after like a year, can’t wait /s
From the videos of Skyrim AI mods I’ve seen, I don’t think it’s that far off. At least for your basic, run-of-the-mill NPCs. They’re already able to know if you take off all your clothes and will ask you stuff like “hey we don’t allow that in here” or “you must be cold”.
We can’t be that far off from a truly immersive RPG game
I think TES NPCs have been reacting to clothing since Daggerfall. Back then it was just a disposition modifier based on the total value of what you were wearing, but still.
I think the best use for it I’ve heard is to make unnamed generic characters sound like more than 3 voice actors greeting you with the same 20 or so lines.
My cousin’s out fighting dragons, and what do I get? Guard duty.
I’m sure a company will start offering ai models for this kind of thing.
I’m less experienced with LLM, but with stable diffusion you can have a main model, and then have smaller detail specific models added in to shape the results. So I would imagine a company will start offering a service where they have base language models with certain amounts of general knowledge/styles of speech, and can mix in smaller models trained on the lore of the world, character’s individual history, and things like that.
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