Stardew Valley Hits New All-Time Player Peak On Steam After 1.6 Update

thegamer.com:

Stardew Valley dropped an update last night that adds a turtle pet, new festivals and events, as well as the Meadowlands Farm, just to name a few of the highlights. The excitement was so palpable that the game's all-time player peak was broken in less than 24 hours.

In the days before the update dropped, Stardew Valley was bouncing between a peak of 55,000 and 66,000 players, but with the update, it quickly shot up to 134,000, a number that's still rising today. Right now, its all-time peak is 146,000.

This is the highest number of concurrent Stardew Valley players since 2021. Three years ago, it hit a peak of 94,000.

At the time of writing - on a Wednesday morning in Britain before half the world has woken up - it still has an incredibly impressive player count of 82,000. That's higher than its peak in February, January, and December, and nearly as high as its peak from 2021.

There's a lot more to the new update than the few points mentioned earlier, like a world map for Ginger Island, a mastery system, winter outfits, mystery boxes, a travelling bookseller, new neighbours, four new crops, a dining room, attic, expanded corner room, and cubby, a bunch of new items, eight achievements, extra accessories in the character creator, and a host of visual improvements.

You can even play with up to eight players on PC now; it was a big update, to say the least, and was quickly followed by a smaller patch that ironed out some of the kinks brought about by 1.6.

If you'd like to read the full, extensive list of patch notes, check out the blog post here .

Not only did the update boost its numbers on Steam, but it also resulted in a massive spike in Twitch viewership. At the start of March 19, there was a peak viewer count of 2,160, but after the update dropped, that quickly skyrocketed to 77,600.

The update is only available on Steam and GOG right now, but ConcernedApe promises that it will arrive on Game Pass "soon". There's no word yet on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.

Res