What do you do when your humble passion project explodes in popularity, making you rich beyond your wildest dreams? For Eric Barone, the answer is simple: Do whatever you want. Forever.
The 36-year-old Seattlite, known by his online handle ConcernedApe, is the sole creative force behind the megahit farming-and-life simulation game Stardew Valley, which he estimates has sold more than 35 million copies — at a price tag of $15 — since its release in 2016. The game's success turned Barone into a gaming industry legend and, as the sole owner of its IP, made him quite wealthy. Eight years after Stardew's release, Barone has just two full-time employees, and the last thing on his mind is growing his business, ConcernedApe. That's because Barone doesn't see money as the goal — the only thing that matters to him is making great games.
The story of Stardew begins in 2011. Barone had recently graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma with a computer science degree, and he was having trouble finding a job. To pass the time and sharpen his coding skills, he began teaching himself how to make a video game in the style of Harvest Moon, the series credited for inventing the farming-and-life sim genre when it was released on the Super Nintendo in 1996. In this genre of game, players focus on growing crops, tending to animals, and building relationships with the neighboring townsfolk.
The game wasn't supposed to be anything more than a fun way to learn a new skill, but over the next five years, it gradually took over Barone's life. He taught himself game design, pixel art, music composition, and many more artistic skills to make the game better and better. "I don't really have a method for learning new things," says Barone. "In general, I think people get held back by being too cerebral, spending too much time on theory. I got good at pixel art by spending 10,000 hours just practicing."
Those five years weren't easy, and Barone wasn't always sure if he would ever release Stardew Valley, but by February 2016 he finally had the game at a level of quality that he felt comfortable sharing with the world. Barone developed the entire game by himself, but initially partnered with game publisher Chucklefish to get some assistance with the aspects of selling a game that didn't appeal to him as much, like business and marketing operations. When the game was released on PC that month, critics and gamers alike fell in love with the cozy setting, quirky characters, and its sense of entrepreneurial wish fulfillment. The gaming website Polygon praised Stardew for being "engrossing in a way that many games of its ilk aren't." On gaming platform Steam, Stardew has more than 600,000 reviews, nearly all of which are positive. One of the few negative reviews reads: "I have no more committed relationships because of the farming turmoil that plagues my life all day and night i will never find peace who am i anymore."
Here's how the game starts: You, as the game's customizable protagonist, are wasting away in a soulless cubicle job before a letter arrives from your late grandfather. "If you're reading this," the letter begins, "you must be in dire need of a change. The same thing happened to me, long ago. I'd lost sight of what mattered most in life… real connections with other people and nature. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong." That place? An idyllic farm town in the country where you will grow crops, raise animals, get married, and become your own boss.
Barone sees more than a few connections between his approach to business-building and the process of cultivating a successful farm in Stardew Valley. To achieve goals in the real world, he says, you need to break down your vision for the future into a series of subtasks. In Stardew Valley, players start with a vision for how they want their farm to look, and then figure out the necessary steps to make that vision a reality. Want to start an animal farm? You're probably going to want a chicken coop, but to build a coop you need to give Robin, the village carpenter, 4,000 gold, 300 wood, and 100 stone — materials that you can find by selling crops, chopping wood, and smashing rocks. Now you have something much more useful than a vision: You have a to-do list.
For years after Stardew's PC release, Barone continued to handle all work on the game by himself, putting out ports built for PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo consoles in December 2016 and October 2017, occasionally getting some light technical assistance from Chucklefish. In December 2018, Barone decided to bring everything related to the game in-house and began self-publishing on PC and most consoles. But Barone quickly found that with his new responsibilities, he was spending less and less time on game development. "I like developing and doing creative stuff," he says, "but when it comes to taxes and dealing with merchandise partners, that's the kind of stuff I don't really enjoy. It would probably be a better use of my time if I had someone to do all that stuff," he realized.
Around the same time, a friend of Barone asked if he had ever considered adapting Stardew Valley into a board game. Barone was intrigued, but cautious; over the years he'd been flooded with offers for brand partnerships. Initially, he was thrilled that his game was popular enough to spawn a line of adorable plushies — which he released with video game merchandise company Fangamer — but over time he became concerned that too many partnerships would stretch him thin, and he wouldn't be able to exert creative control over his rapidly growing cozy kingdom. "If I initiate a project," he says, "that means that I, truly in my heart, am passionate about the idea."
Barone's friend set him up with video game and board game designer Cole Medeiros. Since Medeiros lives in San Francisco, the two first met up in a multiplayer session within Stardew Valley. Medeiros says he was immediately struck by Barone's down-to-earth nature and ability to clearly articulate his vision, so they embarked on a two-and-a-half-year-long project to create the first piece of Stardew Valley merchandise entirely produced and published by ConcernedApe. By the time the board game was finally released in February 2021, the two had developed such a great working relationship that Barone asked Medeiros to join ConcernedApe as his head of operations and business development. Medeiros says his main job is to handle the logistical and operational side of things, so that "magic guy" Barone can devote his time and energy to creating the content for his games.
The company's only other full-time employee is a web admin/community manager who keeps the official Stardew Valley Wiki updated and interacts with the community, although Barone also hires temporary contractors to help with translation, coding, and quality-assurance. "The contractor model is appealing to me as a business owner because it's more free. If you want to do some work for me and then move on to something else, no big deal," he says.
That said, Barone admits he's still learning how to be a manager: "I feel like being a solo game developer was kind of the perfect job for me," he says. "Managing people is a whole new ballgame. If you're not naturally inclined toward it, you'll definitely run into problems. That was my experience. I'm trying my best, I still am, but it's not an easy thing."
Medeiros thinks Barone might be selling himself a bit short with that assessment, describing him as "easily one of the best bosses I've ever had." Medeiros recalls that when the pair launched the board game, he suggested printing more copies to meet demand, but Barone opted to hold off and see the customer response. "And then," says Medeiros, "there were some negative reviews and I was like, 'Oh, no, did we miss the boat in some places?'" Instead of rushing out a quick change, Barone decided to take some extra time to step back, process the feedback, and then roll out changes.
Medeiros says that unlike business development execs at large gaming companies, who he says are always looking for opportunities to make revenue, ConcernedApe has turned down far more offers than it has accepted. "It keeps us more focused on the pillars of what Stardew Valley is about," says Medeiros. "For us, it's not just about making as much money as you can. It's more about the heart of it." Barone has approved and collaborated on a handful of projects with external partners, including a fully illustrated Stardew Valley cookbook published by Penguin Random House and a sold-out symphonic concert tour featuring music from the game, co-produced with Tokyo-based live events company Soho Live.
Unlike most game development companies, ConcernedApe doesn't have a road map that stretches years — or even months — in advance. Instead, Barone's personal priorities determine the company's direction. The way Medeiros sees it, Stardew's success, combined with Barone's desire to stay scrappy, has given the company the "unique luxury" of being focused entirely on quality. "We don't have to compromise our values," he adds.
Barone is tapping into his recent experiences as a manager to draw inspiration for his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. This time, instead of running a farm, players will manage their own chocolate shop. In a 2021 blog post introducing the game, Barone wrote that he wasn't sure where the idea came from exactly, but that to him, chocolate represents "that which is delightful," and if Stardew Valley channeled the energy of the sun, Haunted Chocolatier will channel the energy of the moon.
"I don't have that much experience selling stuff in a brick-and-mortar shop, but there might be some higher-level stuff like managing people," he says. In this new game, players will hire friendly ghosts to staff their chocolate store — and "there might be some interesting managerial issues or conflicts that arise with employees," Barone teases, adding that players might also find themselves in competition with other chocolate makers, including a goliath-size megacorporation.
Since at least 2018, Barone says he has been trying to close the book on Stardew Valley and turn his full attention to new projects like Haunted Chocolatier, but every time he thinks he's out, he keeps pulling himself back in. Just over a year ago, Barone was deep in his work on Haunted Chocolatier while, on the side, prepping a small update to Stardew Valley designed to help fans more easily mod the game, a process in which a package of files are used to alter some element about the game, like changing a character's clothing or even adding new locations. He couldn't help but feel like it wouldn't be fair to release a new update without including any actual new content, "so I started making a little bit of content, and that spiraled into, you know, a whole year of my life working on the update."
The scale of the Stardew Valley update means that Haunted Chocolatier has gone more than a year without any major progress being made, but according to Barone, that's what the money's for. "I kind of follow my whims, but then I end up getting involved in something and I have to see it through to completion," he says. "If I spend a year working on the Stardew Valley update, that's a year I'm not working on Haunted Chocolatier. That's just the way it is."
The new update is the sixth, and possibly last, major post-launch content drop that Barone has developed for the game. The first update, released in October 2016, added new types of farms, made more characters eligible for marriage, and added the ability to divorce your spouse. Later updates added support for additional languages, multiplayer, and a whole new post-game storyline.
What started as a minor addition became Update 1.6, released on PC this past March. The update added a large number of new things, including another new farm type and new late-game mysteries to discover. Players old and new flocked to the farm, and just a few days after the update was released, Stardew Valley re-emerged on Steam's bestseller list and hit its highest concurrent player count ever, with Steam recording a jaw-dropping 236,614 people simultaneously playing the game. Not bad for an eight-year-old game with no advertising.
In many ways, Barone's struggle to move past Stardew Valley mirrors the addictive qualities that have made his game such a massive success. Imagine it's 1 o'clock in the morning, you're playing your Nintendo Switch in bed, and you need to go to sleep — but you can't stop thinking about how tomorrow in the game, your tomatoes will finally be ripe for picking, or your axe and hoe will be ready for an upgrade, or your crush will have a special gift for you. "Just one more day," you think, "then I'll go to bed." Next thing you know, the sun is coming up.
For a perfectionist like Barone, "just one more day" can very easily become "just one more year."
And so Barone is still hard at work getting Stardew Update 1.6 ready for release on consoles like the Switch and Xbox, "but I really just want to get in my cave and focus on Haunted Chocolatier without any distractions," he says. "I feel like I'm always working toward that, and then things come up and I have to see them through, but I'm always dreaming of like, 'Oh man, someday I'll be able to get back in my cave and just develop.'"
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