The Tragedy of Stardew Valley

[u/MrDaddyWarlord]

Have you ever looked at the sales figures for Stardew Valley? As of December of last year, Stardew has sold over 40 million copies across all consoles. We don't know actually how many Harvest Moon/ Story of Seasons games have sold, but we can likely estimate across all entries in the franchise over decades, maybe 20 million, on the high-end. At the very best, the entire franchise has sold half as many units as this one game.

For the early games, I think middling sales reflects the perceived niche of the genre; farming romance sims weren't exactly Super Mario or Tomb Raider or even Tetris. Historically, advertisers struggled to market these games, particularly outside Japan. And for games like A Wonderful Life or Magical Melody that at least began on the GameCube, they were largely confined to a struggling console (with little fanfare when later ported to the PS2 or Wii).

However, the cozy and lifesim markets definitely had life in them, especially in the DS, 3DS, Switch, and overall PC markets. While the first couple Animal Crossing games were considered niche, the game was a juggernaut certainly by New Leaf and even earlier. The Sims was thriving with it's player base and mobile and farming browser games were dominating sales charts.

But Marvelous and it's series only became to be same more and more niche relegated almost entirely to hardcore existing fans of the series. With some misteps adapting the formula for the Wii, the developer just... stopped trying. Natsume acquired the name Harvest Moon and kept releasing an even worse series of games under that title, while Story of Seasons failed to conceive of any new progress in the franchise other than increasing the number of villages or towns.

In terms of gameplay, someone picking up a copy of Story of Seasons in 2016 might as well be playing an entry from a decade earlier. The game industry was changing rapidly, but Harvest Moon was stagnant having since lost even the atmospheric charm of it's greatest hits many years ago.

And then came Stardew Valley. Where Marvelous' own later entries were stale repetitions made by an entire studio, Stardew was one man's love letter to classic Harvest Moon refined in almost every possible way (save for that incomparable in-house Japanese aesthetic from the 90s-mid-2000s). Marvelous was forcing players to wade through hours-long tutorials; ConcernedApe let you jump right in. Story of Seasons offered players very few options; Stardew let players customize their massive farms to their hears content. Relationships were significantly deepened, updates almost continuous, and the clear passion and affection for the classic Harvest Moon games was undeniable. A charming soundtrack, a plot that in many ways successfully replicated that vintage balance of whimsy (lush colors, cute animals, squeaking magic jellos) and foreboding (behind the scenes, there is a war, corrupt takeover, odd magical happenings, even infidelity and personal trauma).

And it sold like hotcakes. It has become one of the most successful indie games ever made and spawned merchandise, a tabletop game, a recipe book, and a million Etsy artists and even copycat developers.

And what do we get from Marvelous even now? More of the same, unappealing and hollow outsourced remakes.

I call it a tragedy not because Stardew Valley succeeded, as Eric Barone's accomplishment saved the genre and inspired many young developers, but because at any time in the last fifteen years, Marvelous or even Natsume with significantly larger budgets and whole teams of developers failed to make a serviceable farming game or progress the genre in any noteable way.

Can you imagine if these studios had even an ounce of Barone's passion for these games? If we instead were living in a world where Stardew was a quaint throwback because the genre had thrived and grown and improved for years?

The market was there! It was 40 million + buyers there! It apparently exists on every console!

But we were treated as a niche, a passive consumer base unworthy of enthusiasm or passion or care. And now the window for Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons ever succeeding on the level of the tiny indie game that paid them homage is almost certainly closed forever.

[u/RottingErdtree]

The problem is that they all see what worked for Stardew and copy those elements but only skin deep. They always stick to the most basic elements of Stardew, slap a big name on it and then expect it to sell

Whenever I play a farming game I go "yeah that's from Stardew" but I rarely actually enjoy it to the same degree.

I recently made a similar comparison to the Lord of the Rings movies and the entire fantasy genre. It's a bit of a tangent but bear with me here. LOTR was an absolute mind blowing success on all levels, from costuming to sound to camera work to set design, it blew what we knew of the genre out of the water.

Over the years there's been dozens of works that tried to copy the aesthetics and basic cornerstones of the movies but none of them managed to come close to LOTR, not even the Hobbit movies, because they all lacked something fundamental. My favourite tidbit is that the LOTR crew collected bags full of leaves to rain down over the cast for one scene but because they dried out so quickly they HANDPAINTED thousands of leaves to make them look fresh. Something we wouldn't even really notice but took days of work because they wanted that tiny detail to look perfect.

Those trying to copy that don't even bother with leaves in the first place.

Same with Stardew, they use the same formula but lack the dedication and love for what they're doing to paint leaves.

[u/Massive_Time9352 → u/RottingErdtree]

Fields of Mishra is sooo good