The Reality of Making Stardew Valley

[Andrey]

Hearing about the success of this game is sexy, but what really took to make it happen is literally Hell.

How many people can actually pull this off?

 

 

[Leo Gura]

You'll find that this is common across all business start-ups. 

Starting a biz from scratch can be hell. Which is why most of them fail. Starting a biz is endless work. And game dev is endless work.

Very few people can pull off being an entreprenuer. Which is why they are rare and earn huge sums.

Edited Tuesday at 08:24 PM by Leo Gura

[Yimpa]

Work, rest, rinse, repeat:

 

[The Caretaker]

I found this talk recently about the marketing of Balatro, aka "The Indie Fenomena of 2024" - https://gdcvault.com/play/1035036/-Balatro-Turning-Low-Resolution

The Binding of Isaac, Balatro, Stardew and so on, where picked at some point by a publisher. According to PR manager from the GDC video, Balatro, at some point, had a team of 7-10 people for marketing alone!

The game had no initial traction and if not for the publisher, I don't think it would have exploded even 1% of its current player base. So, idk, you can always take the route of gambling and hope somebody (steamer/publisher) will pick your product eventually, or you try to build your own community, which will increase the development time by a few folds . It's brutal either way, not to mention that you need a good game to begin with.

[FourCrossedWands]

14 hours ago, Yimpa said:

Work, rest, rinse, repeat:

 

We can only imagine what percentage of those earnings are kids stealing money from their parents to buy Robux.

[Andrey]

On 4/29/2025 at 11:47 PM, Yimpa said:

Work, rest, rinse, repeat:

 

Nice bizz, enslaving the minds of young children and using them to leech off of their parents. Children are such an easy prey nowadays and they get exploited like hell. It's maddening.