‘Stardew Valley’ has sold more than 20 million copies

engadget.com:

Six years after its initial release, Stardew Valley has sold more than 20 million copies. Creator Eric Barone shared news of the accomplishment in an update posted to the game’s press site and an interview with PC Gamer. "The 20 million copies milestone is really amazing," he told the outlet.

But what’s even more impressive is the increasing pace of Stardew Valley’s sales. It took four years for the game to sell its first 10 million copies. Since September 2021, it has sold 5 million units. "The average daily sales of Stardew Valley are higher today than at any point," Barone said. "I'm not exactly sure why that is. My hope is that the game is just continuing to spread via word of mouth, and the more people that are playing it, the more people will share the game with their friends.”

Barone told PC Gamer he plans to continue working on Stardew Valley but is now primarily focused on Haunted Chocolatier, a new action RPG he announced last fall. "Ultimately I have to follow my heart or else the quality of the content will suffer," Barone said.

Twenty million copies sold is an impressive feat for any game, let alone one that a single person developed. Barone began working on Stardew Valley after graduating with a computer science degree from the University of Washington Tacoma. He found that he couldn’t land a position in his field following the 2008 financial crisis, so he started developing the game to hone his craft. He then spent the next four years working on the project before finally releasing Stardew Valley at the start of 2016. Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier documents the entire saga in his excellent 2017 book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.