One person, four and a half years
Eric Barone left university, could not find programming work, and started building a farming game to improve his portfolio. He kept at it for about four and a half years, most of the day, every day, supported by his partner and a job as an usher at a cinema.
He did all of it himself: the code, the PIXEL art, the music, the writing. He redrew the artwork completely several times over, because he kept getting better at drawing while he worked. The finished game has since sold more than thirty million copies.
It is really a game about time
A day in PELICAN TOWN lasts about fifteen real minutes, and you cannot possibly do everything in it. WATERING the CROPS, MINING in the CAVE, FISHING, FORAGING, COOKING and actually talking to anybody all compete for the same handful of hours, and your ENERGY gives out before the day does.
So the real game is not farming, it is choosing. A SPRINKLER is exciting because it buys back an hour every single morning. A GREENHOUSE matters because it ignores the SEASONS entirely. Both are, in effect, ways of purchasing time.
The choice the game refuses to nag you about
Partway through, the valley puts a decision in front of you. The abandoned community centre can be restored slowly, by gathering produce from every season and every corner of the map — or it can be handed to Joja, the corporation whose new supermarket is squeezing out the local shop, which is far quicker and costs nothing but money.
Nobody tells you off either way. The town simply looks different afterwards, and the game notices without comment. It is a surprisingly pointed idea to find in a gentle game about growing parsnips.
Still not finished
Barone carried on updating the game for years after it had sold millions, adding areas, characters and entire systems, and has never charged for any of it. Anyone who bought it in 2016 for the price of a takeaway has had the better part of a decade of free additions.
The players returned the favour. Stardew has one of the largest collections of community-made modifications of any game — new CROPS, new neighbours, new farm layouts — much of it built by people who taught themselves the tools, in the spirit of a game that was made by somebody doing exactly that.
Why the calm ones sell
Stardew, Animal Crossing and their relatives sell in enormous numbers for a straightforward reason: a great many people do not want to be shot at. A game where the worst thing that can happen is fainting in the CAVE and waking up having mislaid some ORE is a restful way to spend an evening.
There is a FESTIVAL every season, a CHICKEN to name, a BARN to fill, a SCARECROW to put up and no way at all to lose. For anyone who assumes video games mean noise and stress, the valley is the counter-argument.