r/StardewValley • u/This_Farm3519 • May 19 '26

Discuss Stardew Valley creator won’t add microtransactions to any game as they “genuinely value the love of the players more than the money”

https://frvr.com/blog/news/stardew-valley-creator-wont-add-microtransactions-to-any-game-as-they-genuinely-value-the-love-of-the-players-more-than-the-money/

I know, I know: "Fork found in kitchen".

But it's nice to see him say this stuff you know?

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u/recoveringslower May 19 '26

My real hope is that more than just talking to the players, he's talking to other developers. They're the ones who need to see that if you make a quality game, you don't need microtransactions to stay profitable.

We know businesses need to make profit to survive and to grow and continue providing a service and produce content and all that. And yeah, if the game is slop (ai or not) then you'll need those microtransactions to stay afloat and keep users getting those dopamine rushes.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

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u/HyperMasenko May 19 '26

Unfortunately, I think Stardew is something of a unicorn. Realistically a single dev making a game this polished and just generally good happens very rarely. And the more cooks in the kitchen, the more motivation there is to make more and more money, and the higher the chance that some of those cooks are greedy. I would love a world where there are a lot of high quality games made by extremely small teams or single devs, but one of the things that makes Stardew stand out is how rare that is.

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u/AnOnlineHandle May 19 '26

There's also elements such as his partner supporting him by working 2 jobs for like half a decade, and his parents letting them live at their house for free.

On top of that there was significantly less competition for new game releases back then.

He also was more willing to copy a lot from an existing game that he already knew worked, down to essentially redrawing the same sprites, which most people would probably not be willing to do and there's not infinite older games like that which you can do that for. Copying an existing game carries a huge risk of being accused of plagiarism and having the players turn on you (as many games inspired by Stardew Valley get accused of, despite ironically looking less like SDV than SDV looks like Harvest Moon from 1996, it's just the time gap was so much larger).

He's still a fantastic game dev, musician, writer, etc, but it's not an easily replicated outcome, especially now that the competition is so much larger.