Stardew Valley has sold over 15 million copies as creator shifts to new project

(Image credit: ConcernedApe)

The incredibly addictive farming sim Stardew Valley has officially hit 15 million sales, as developer Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone announces he's shifting focus to an unannounced project.

The press page for the game shows the new milestone, after previously hitting 10 million sales at the beginning of 2020. Those kinds of numbers are no mean feat for any game, let alone one that saw a large chunk of its development handled by a single person. While there's no data for sales across individual platforms, last year's milestone predicted that around half of all the copies sold were on PC.

It's very much a well-deserved milestone—Barone has pushed out several significant free updates since the game's 2016 release, with the most recent 1.5 update throwing in tons of quality-of-life and endgame features. It also happens to be a fantastic game, so much so that even Barone spent a ton of his free time playing it during last year's lockdowns.

While Stardew Valley is going from strength to strength, it seems like Barone is ready to start moving onto other projects. During the game's first esport tournament this month (yes, you read that correctly), he told co-organiser UnsurpassableZ during a Q&A "I'm not saying there's going to be another Stardew Valley update. I don't even know at this point. Right now I'm focused on my next game, so we'll see," (thanks, Eurogamer.)

Barone mentioned that he may "announce it fairly soon," saying "what it is… no-one knows at this point. What I will say is it's another pixel art game, a top-down perspective similar to Stardew Valley. In some ways, it is kind of similar to Stardew Valley, but it's not a farming game. It's something different."

Mollie spent her early childhood deeply invested in games like Killer Instinct, Toontown and Audition Online, which continue to form the pillars of her personality today. She joined PC Gamer in 2020 as a news writer and now lends her expertise to write a wealth of features, guides and reviews with a dash of chaos. She can often be found causing mischief in Final Fantasy 14, using those experiences to write neat things about her favourite MMO. When she's not staring at her bunny girl she can be found sweating out rhythm games, pretending to be good at fighting games or spending far too much money at her local arcade.