Stardew Valley’s creator thinks he will “always have a desire to come back and maybe add a thing or two”, so we can probably expect to wait for Haunted Chocolatier for a while longer

Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone is obviously notorious for being unable to stop adding to Stardew Valley, but it sounds like he could do it even decades on.

Did you know Stardew Valley is one of the best selling games of all time? Seriously, it’s in the top 20 best selling games ever, which might be a bit surprising considering its company is games like Breath of the Wild and Call of Duty. I’m sure that’s in no small part thanks to the games constant updates in the almost 10 years since it first released, the most recent one being the game’s 1.6 update last year. Of course, you’d think that eventually updates would stop, and in an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered, Barone does roughly know when he would stop, but also thinks that he could be going for quite a long time.

“I do take in a lot of what the fans are saying,” Barone said when asked about what his relationship is with his fans. “I pay attention to what their thoughts are, what their criticisms are. And the players are very important to me. I mean, I will never forget that it’s because of the players that I’m in this position, that the game was able to be popular, that my dreams as a game developer have come true.” In turn, he said he feels that he wants to “give it back to them in the way that they’ve given [it] to me.”

There is a limit to how much one can put into a game, though, and when asked if he sees a point in time where the game will finally be complete, Barone said that he thinks “a game can have too much content. And I ultimately want Stardew Valley to be the best game it can be. So if I feel like it’s starting to become kind of overwhelmed with content to the point where it’s detrimental to the game’s entertainment factor, I would stop at that point.

“Another thing is, I do want to make more than one game in my life. Including the development time, I’ve been working on Stardew Valley for over 12 years now. But I don’t want to definitively say that the book is ever closed, because I think I will always have a desire to come back and maybe add a thing or two. You know, maybe even 50 years from now, I might add something.” He even joked that he thinks it would be “funny to release an update when I’m, like, 90 years old,” but I think by that point he might have earned his retirement.

Of course, Barone is working on another game right now, Haunted Chocolatier, which he did make clear to fans last month isn’t “abandoned” despite the fact he’s still working on Stardew Valley too (though that doesn’t mean he has a release date yet either).