The Switch release of Stardew Valley has filled my house with that endless, plucky music again. I tried to resist it, but watching all that sick parsnip growing action eventually drew me to my PC to give Stardew my first real go. I played it a bit when it came out, but not long enough to build up a proper farm. 20 hours in now, I am the mayonnaise king.
I've accepted that I'm a bad PUBG player, in part because I'm too focused on getting stuff and not enough on not dying, so it's an appropriate break—all I'm doing in Stardew is getting stuff. A chicken coop. Some chickens. A mayonnaise machine. More chickens. More mayonnaise. An endless stream of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise for everyone in town. My backpack isn't big enough to hold all this mayonnaise. See? It's basically the same game: just like in PUBG, I need to find a new backpack as soon as possible. Except for mayonnaise. It's much more pleasant.
What are you playing this weekend, or whenever you have an evening to play? Let us know in the comments! I've been tempted to play Shadow of War, as well, but I'm worried I'll go looking for, but will never find, a story as good as Tim's. I'll probably recruit a few PC Gamer Club members to play some Rocket League, too, if I'm not too busy handling all this mayonnaise while half-watching a hockey game.
Eric Barone spent four years making Stardew Valley, teaching himself to code, to draw and redraw pixel art, to write characters and design a fun farming sim. For most of those four years he worked on it 10 hours a day, while also working part-time as a theater usher. Barone and his girlfriend scraped by on his part-time income and her grad school stipend. And after those four years of work, he released Stardew Valley on Steam for just 15 bucks.
For Barone, the pricing worked out—Stardew Valley has since sold around three million copies. But that's a success story few indie games can claim, and surprisingly, Stardew actually cost nearly twice the average price of indie games on Steam.
Steamspy creator Sergey Galyonkin, who by day is head of publishing for Epic Games in Eastern Europe, recently claimed that the average indie game is priced at $8.72 on Steam. And they sell few copies: the average number of sales is 21,000, a figure that's greatly distorted by big indie hits. And many of these are sold not at full price but during sales, when the average price halves to $4.63.
"The indie games are too damn cheap," he led his article, arguing that prices are unsustainable for many developers. He suggested that they should take advantage of their niche qualities: if a game has attracted a sale on the merits of its ideas, why not charge more? And he closed his argument with the final point, "If the game is worth the gamers' time, it's also worth their money."
In theoretical terms, it sounds like a strong argument. But in real terms, how does an indie developer think about pricing their game? How do they think about the number of other games that are releasing alongside theirs? Steamspy records more than 5,500 games released on Steam so far this year, compared to 2016's 5,050 and 2015's 2,995. With so many games now arriving on Steam, how do they stand to compete?
Why Heat Signature costs $15
We all know there are more games than ever before on Steam, and many of them are trying to use the competitive pricing card and price their games lower than they might have a couple years ago.
Andreea Chifu, Raw Fury
I'm good friends with Tom Francis, who used to work on PC Gamer before he left to finish his first game, Gunpoint, which he released in 2013. After a period thinking it'd be free, he asked the readers of his blog if he should charge money for it, and 99% of the comments agreed. He priced Gunpoint at $10, a figure he hoped would represent Gunpoint's three-hour playing time and feel "pleasantly low, so people would be pleased they got something of value." In part, though, it was informed by his lack of confidence in whether people would like his game, or that it had a wide breadth of appeal. $10 felt right.
Francis' next major game was Heat Signature, which he released in September. More experienced but unsure he could replicate the success of Gunpoint, he started to think about its price two years in advance, settling on three possible brackets: $10, $15 and $20. "I had a strong feeling it was worth more than Gunpoint, because if you like it, you'll get way more hours out of it," he told me.
But he knew his own opinion of the value of his game is irrelevant. "The only question that's relevant is how well it would do at these price points," he says. So once again he turned to his audience and in March he asked his beta players what they'd pay. The data he got back suggested that there was little real difference in revenue between pricing at $10 or $15. Fewer people would pay $15, but the additional $5 made up for the shortfall. He asked again in August, and the average figure came in $15, supporting Francis' own hunch for its value, so he felt fairly certain it would fit with prospective customers' sense of its worth.
The rising cost of production
Gunpoint and Heat Signature sit squarely in the standard pricing for indie games on Steam. But if Heat Signature only gained Steamspy's average number of sales, it would have netted Francis a loss. He spent $260,000 on its production, including paying an artist, a programmer and for music, and after Steam's cut, Francis would have a $43,000 overdraft to show for four years' work. Fortunately, Heat Signature is an excellent game, and he has a big enough following that it's sold comfortably above that level. But it shows the risk that developers face in ascribing fair-seeming prices to their games.
In general, small PC developers, small artists, authors and those kinds of creatives woefully underprice their products.
Economist Mark Bergen
Games like Gonner and Kingdom: New Lands are also in this pricing bracket, and their publisher, Raw Fury, takes into account production cost when considering prices. Head of sales and distribution Andreea Chifu tells me that they also consider competition, target audience, customer preferences and feedback from sales partners. And she feels the general pricing market might well be trending slightly downwards. "We all know there are more games than ever before on Steam, and many of them are trying to use the competitive pricing card and price their games lower than they might have a couple years ago. I personally don't think it helps so much, especially as production costs continue to rise."
The source of those costs, she says, are partly down to salary pressure: in Stockholm, where Chifu is based, game companies are struggling to retain talented staff. Partly it's down to inflation, which is not being reflected in game prices. And partly they're down to production costs, from freelancer rates and office space to software and equipment. She observes that Q.U.B.E. developer Toxic Games found the sequel cost more to develop than the first game. "So they had to make the sequel as cost-effective as possible and not pay themselves for a few months during that time. Which sadly is not uncommon in the games industry."
At the top end of the indie pricing scale is The Witness, which was released January 2016 at $40 and has never been put on sale for less than $20. "It seemed like a big enough game, in terms of playtime and complexity, to warrant that price," lead developer Jonathan Blow tells me.
Blow's thinking behind it follows Galyonkin's argument precisely: "A higher price insulates against the danger that it might be a niche game, which was definitely a possibility in this case, because the game is so weird. If only a certain subset of gamers is going to be interested in your game, you won't necessarily reach more people by reducing the price, you may just lose support from the people who want to support you."
The choice appears to have been right for The Witness, since it sold better than Blow expected in its initial launch and continued to sell well afterwards. But he's not sure whether it proves Galyonkin right. "I don't know that $40 was the optimal price point," he says. "It may be that the game would have done even better at $30, but there's no way to know." And it can't be used as a model for other games because the games market is already so different today to what it was when The Witness came out.
There's an easy economic argument to all this, of course: that it's a typical case of a market that has been disrupted by cheap tools like Unity and easy distribution like Steam, which have profoundly lowered the costs to entry, attracting more developers than the market can support. And then, free market economics being what is is, over time it'll normalise.
But when I spoke to Mark Bergen, an economist at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, it was clear that his sympathies lie with indie devs and that he values the effects of their freewheeling creativity on games as a whole. "In general, small PC developers, small artists, authors and those kinds of creatives woefully underprice their products," he told me. That's because, he argues, they tend to base their prices on cost of production. "And that intersects with people whose talents aren't pricing so they follow the herd, and like lemmings they're led over the cliff."
An economist argues that indie games like Stardew Valley should be priced based on perceived value, not production budget.
How indie devs can raise their prices
Instead, he says, they should instead be basing price on value. Value-based pricing is all about perceived value, not production value. It's how big brands work—how they charge more for common products, just because of their name. But for indies, value-based pricing is a scary prospect because it depends on convincing the world their game is special, and that's hard when most indies lack a recognised brand name and they're entering a market crowded with similar games.
The Witness managed it, though, and it did it by following one of Bergen's general strategies for going value-based: by focusing on making a high-quality, distinctive, long and feature-filled game. Easy, right? Of course, The Witness also had Blow's reputation behind it.
In games, perhaps the scarcity is players' time. And if that's right, perhaps an indie dev's real battle is to prove their game is worth time, rather than simply money.
There are other strategies. Indies could segment their offering, making differently priced versions to cater to different aspects of their market. This is something Tom Francis has done for both Gunpoint and Heat Signature, for which he offers a Supporters Edition for $30. Including soundtracks, early builds and videos in which he tells the story behind its development and at double the price, it's the fan-embracing edition, designed to allow them to support a game they liked, rather than specifically to raise value. During Heat Signature's initial release, the Supporters Edition represented 20 percent of its revenue.
There's behavioral pricing, which attempts to change attitudes towards value. Many customers will psychologically link a $10 game to other $10 games, but a $30 price might signal that it's better than the crowd. Alternatively, there's ‘Goldilocks pricing' which guides attitudes: make three versions, one cheap, one expensive, and many customers will plump for the one that feels just right in the middle. Or they could relate a game to its existing exemplars through its pricing. So they can advertise, say, a Civ-like game as 20% cheaper than Civilisation, rather than price it with the low price of other indie strategy games. (Maybe because he's an economist, Bergen is a big Civ fan.)
Or, finally, indie devs can think in terms of offering trials, cross-selling, a free version or paid DLC down the line, so the initial release is the start of a campaign designed to bring players in and get their money later on.
Time and money
Clearly, none of these strategies is easy. They all come with big risks. And besides, there's another argument to make about all this. Your Steam pile of shame is testament to a big constraint being not so much your money but your time to play them. When you consider a snap purchase, do you think about your wallet or whether you'll want to play it over your other games? When I propose this idea to Bergen, he's intrigued at how different the game market is to most others. Few industries are as interested in retaining customers' attention and time.
But he wonders if it relates to the ‘economics of stars,' which explains why player value at the top end of sports leagues rises so stratospherically high. In basketball, the quality of players is a smooth scale from the top to the bottom, but their value is heavily skewed towards the top. Here, the scarcity of the very best players collapses a fluid market of many prices in favour of a super-valuable high end. It's a winners' market: if you win, you win big.
In games, perhaps the scarcity is players' time. And if that's right, perhaps an indie dev's real battle is to prove their game is worth time, rather than simply money. Thinking about it this way might help to pull indie games out of a current market price which is unsustainably low for the numbers many sell. And that really does matter to us all. If creative developers can't make a living, that's not only bad for them, it's also bad for us. We lose an important layer of experimentation, and PC gaming as a whole suffers.
I can't wait for the next game from Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone's, the creator of the brilliant, gentle farming sim Stardew Valley. Details about his future plans are sparse but during a Reddit Q&A he shed some light on his next project's setting, revealing that it will take place "on the same planet" as Stardew Valley, "although it's not a sequel or expansion in any way".
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should expect another pleasant countryside backdrop. Presumably, not everywhere on the planet is as idyllic as Pelican Town, where Stardew Valley takes place. Plus, the next game could be set in a different time period with different circumstances.
Barone is keeping his cards close to his chest about what the next game will involve, telling users that he doesn't want to pile on the pressure caused by premature hype. Plus it sounds like, whatever it is, is a while off. What he does say, though, is that it will build on a genre or style of game that he feels has not yet fully reached its potential, in the same way Stardew Valley did with Harvest Moon-style farming games.
"I am thinking of approaching my next game with a similar mindset to Stardew Valley—take a style of game that was never fully realized (or that changed trajectories, leaving unexplored possibilities), and carry on the tradition in my own weird way."
But away from his next project, will there be a sequel to Stardew Valley? "I would consider making a Stardew Valley 2 eventually... but not for a bit," he said.
Stardew Valley - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
The creator of Stardew Valley [official site] has opened up a little about plans for his next game, something mysterious that’s set on the same planet as Stardew but is not a sequel. Don’t expect to hear juicy details from Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone any time soon because he’s avoiding building heaps of hype but he does say that, similar to Stardew Valley, it will likely pick up another game or genre with space to explore and take it in his own direction. (more…)
In the time since Stardew Valley was originally released, I have played it into the ground. I've reached year 10 in my first save, pushed myself to complete the community center upgrades in a single year for my second save, and supported Jojamart just to give myself an excuse for a third save. Like many others, I was obsessed with Stardew Valley for bringing the casual farm and life sim genre to PC where I thought it was destined never to take root.
Over three years later, games blending farming with life and town simulation are flourishing. There's no shortage of games like Stardew Valley on PC now, with even more in development. Some focus more on building relationships and revitalizing a town while others are all about crafting. Whichever end of Stardew Valley you prefer, there's another game like it in our list to keep you playing for just one more in-game day. Now that there are plenty of options to choose from, some are inevitably better and worse than others. We've collected a list of the best Stardew-style games available so you can choose which homestead to put down roots in.
Like Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons had never made its way to PC until it paired with the most unlikely of companions: a young manga protagonist from the '70s. Doraemon Story of Seasons takes the pastoral life adventure into a setting full of distinctly Japanese setting unlike Harvest Moon and most of its derivatives that go for a more "anywhere" rural vibe. This incarnation of Story of Seasons has Noby and his friends doing all the usual rural life activities like planting fields of crops, making friends, cooking, and attending festivals in the town of Natura. Its adorable watercolor visual style is a welcome change from past Story of Seasons games that had retained Harvest Moon's chibi-style 3D aesthetic.
Plenty of town sim fans will tell you that Story of Seasons is the true inheritor of the Harvest Moon series after the developers best known for the HM series lost the rights to continue using its name and subsequently rebranded. Doraemon Story of Seasons' routinely higher review scores than Light of Hope suggest that the talent has remained, even if the title hasn't.
My Time At Portia
Released: January 23, 2018 | Developer: Pathea Games | Steam
My Time At Portia is the rare 3D town sim of the bunch that ends up feeling like Stardew Valley by way of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. On the little island of Portia, your father leaves you the deed to his old workshop. Instead of just growing crops, you'll be collecting and refining resources from all over the island to fulfill contracts requested by the locals. Its crafting system is heavily nested, with most recipes requiring a suite of special machines to be built and placed in the workshop yard.
Eventually you're able to build garden plots as well, though you won't be running a full-size farm operation like your neighbor Sophie, the actual local farmer. Portia has quite a bit more combat than Stardew, with dungeons to go spelunking through for loot and crafting components. It does have plenty of interaction with all of Portia's residents as well. Over the course of seasons and years you'll make friends with and be able to eventually marry one of your many eligible townsfolk by going on dates and delivering them gifts.
Graveyard Keeper
Released: August 15, 2018 | Developer: Lazy Bear Games | Steam
In Graveyard Keeper you'll be planting corpses instead of crops. Your protagonist has become the new caretaker of the medieval graveyard by way of potential death and amnesia and will need to clean the place up to discover his origins. You'll spend time collecting resources and building new devices for your graveyard to refine materials and exploit the bodies dropped off in your yard. Graveyard Keeper is much more of a grindy crafting simulation than other Stardew-like games, but it shares that "one more day" lure. You'll just be coming back to chop a few more trees and refine more materials rather than harvest your pumpkins. Graceyard Keeper also recently added a new DLC called "Stranger Sins" that lets you build and manage your own tavern in case you needed some extra simulation with your crafting.
Fantasy Farming: Orange Season
Released: Early Access| Developer: Tropical Puppy | Steam, itch.io
Orange Season has been in Early Access for over two years but is already cut from the same cloth as Stardew Valley. You can raise crops and animals on your farm as well as tame wild animals and bring them home to raise. All the other usual suspects are here as well: Changing seasons, tool upgrades, building relationships with townsfolk, and farm customization. There are a few neat little changes to the recipe like being able to have an NPC friend follow you around as a companion.
Orange Season has been in Early Access for plenty long but does seem to be continually in flux, with a big rework to the map occurring at one point in development and improvements to other systems coming frequently as well. Currently, Orange Season is on update 0.5.1 according to its Steam news posts, with the awaited dating system coming in the next update.
Garden Paws
Released: December 18, 2018 | Developer: Bitten Toast Games| Steam
Garden Paws is the animal version of Stardew Valley where you'll take over your grandparents' farm while running a shop, gardening, and raising animals. For the multiplayer-inclined, you can invite up to three friends to your farm to play with you or, for Twitch streamers, integrate your chat so that viewers can have customers in your store named after them. There are currently 10 little creatures to play as while helping to rebuild the town with new shops that can unlock additional quests and areas to explore. It appears to be a combination of Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley with plenty of farming, building, and crafting.
Slime Rancher
Released: August 1, 2017 | Developer: Monomi Park| Steam
As is tradition, Slime Rancher begins with the protagonist Beatrix LeBeau being gifted a property to take over. This time, it's a slime ranch lightyears away from planet earth. As a newly indoctrinated slime rancher, Beatrix must build enclosures for her slimes and grow plenty of crops and chickadoos to keep them well-fed. Along the way you'll explore the Far Far Range, upgrade your spacey vacpack tool, and combine your slimes into new varieties. Slime Rancher doesn't have the same focus on relationships with NPCs that other Stardew-type games do, but it has plenty of exploration and customization.
World's Dawn
Released: January 25, 2016 | Developer: Wayward Prophet| Steam
Only a few PC games follow the Harvest Moon formula as closely as Stardew Valley, and most of them are of questionable quality. World’s Dawn is the exception. It is a bit rougher around the edges than Stardew, but all the same charm is there. You can befriend and marry villagers, grow and sell crops, fish, attend festivals, and bring prosperity back to a stagnating village.
World’s Dawn is more about coloring inside the lines than forging your own path. Your farming plots are predetermined and you won’t be constructing additional buildings on your property. That being said, there are plenty of clothing options, home décor, and cooking recipes. Despite the outdated 4:3 aspect ratio and initially confusing menus, World’s Dawn is full of cute characters that make putting up with a few petty complaints more than worth it. If you want to play the same game in a slightly different flavor, this is the best choice.
Kynseed
Released: Early Access | Developer: PixelCount Studios| Steam, GOG
Kynseed leans more heavily into town simulation and exploration than farming. It has a highly detailed and colorful pixel art style that makes it look like the more magical cousin to some other Stardew-type games. Kynseed focuses less on farming in favor of spreading itself evenly across all elements of a town simulation. You can run a shop, go exploring outside town, build relationships with NPCs, and eventually come home to plant crops on your land. Kynseed is the first game by a studio of former Fable developers and comes with the same quirky and eccentric humor of those old adventure RPGs.
Verdant Skies
Released: February 12, 2018 | Developer: Howling Moon Software| Steam
Instead of a small town in the country, Verdant Skies has you become the newest member of a small colony on the planet Viridis Primus. The colony is small to begin with but after helping build more homes you'll be joined by more residents each with their own expertise to help grow the colony and your operation.
As the new space farmer in town, you'll need to turn native space plants into an agricultural operation. You can even catch and tame wild animal species as well. Both can be turned into the strongest and most efficient specimens with Verdant Skies' genetic combiner machine.
Garden Story
Released: In development | Developer: Picogram | Steam
Garden Story hasn't been released yet, but it's one to keep an eye on for those who like cute and wholesome farming games. Concord the grape tackles all the usual tasks of the Stardew-style game. You'll bring life back to the island, do favors for your fruity friends, and cultivate your garden while investigating The Rot that's destroying the village. Garden Story is planned to release sometime in the spring of 2020.
Ooblets
Released: In development | Developer: Glumberland| Epic
Ooblets has been in development for several years and unfortunately a release date still doesn't appear to be on the horizon. Despite being far off yet, Ooblets is still widely anticipated after making an impression on potential players back in 2017 with its adorably awkward dance moves and Pokemon-like plant creatures. Ooblets will let you customize your character with pastel-colored fashion choices and decorate your house with furniture. You'll spend time exploring town and growing ooblets in your garden before taking them out to dance battle against other characters' ooblets creatures. Ooblets' dedication to wholesome awkwardness is even in the names of its creatures which are burdened with titles like "chickadingding," "dumbirb," and "shrumbo" among plenty others.
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Chucklefish, the developer behind Starbound and publisher of Stardew Valley, is taking some inspiration from the latter for one of its next games. Aside from the Advance Wars-inspired game it's working on, the publisher-studio told us in January that it's creating "an RPG/Sim set in a magic school, something like Stardew Valley meets Harry Potter."
Today, Chuckefish CEO Finn Brice tweeted a peek at the game, stating that they've "learned a lot of lessons from working with Stardew."
It isn't a lot to go on, but based on the quaint cafe and witch hat sporting kids on the left of the image, it looks like a pixel art rendition of Little Witch Academia. If that's at all an accurate description of what Chucklefish is up to, I'm absolutely here for it. The 'art style demonstration' video from October of last year also looks promising.
Chucklefish is currently working with Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone on adding multiplayer to Stardew, and beta testing for that should begin at the end of the year, according to a recent update. There's been no mention of Barone being involved with any Chucklefish-developed games, so for now we'll assume this magic RPG is simply taking inspiration from Stardew Valley, which of course took its inspiration from Harvest Moon. Around and around we go.
Stardew Valley - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
The first green sprouts of multiplayer should push up into cutesy farm life RPG Stardew Valley [official site] at the end of this year, publishers Chucklefish have announced. Chucklefish are chipping in with multiplayer and expect it’ll be ready to launch properly in “early 2018”. For now, they’ve explained a little more of how it will work. (more…)
Chucklefish said earlier this year that the multiplayer update to Stardew Valley that everyone's looking forward to would not be out this summer, and sorry to say, I'm not here to deliver any happy surprises—that still holds true. But work has progressed far enough that the studio is now ready to start talking about how the new feature will work and what it will include, and said that beta testing is expected to begin around the end of the year.
Shortly after the game starts, Robin will offer to build up to three cabins on your farm, each of which will serve as the home for a farmhand who will be controlled by another player. Farmhands have their own separate inventory and can do "almost anything" the main character can, including farming, mining, fighting, foraging, marrying NPCs, and taking part in festivals. Some decisions will have to be made by the main player, however.
Friend invites will be handled through Steam, rather than separate multiplayer servers, and local multiplayer options, split-screen, and PvP aren't currently planned. Marriage between players is in the works, although how exactly that will work is still being hammered out. "It’s an idea we like a lot, and want to make available as a feature," Chucklefish wrote. "Player-to-player marriage won’t use the mermaid pendant, but rather an alternative method that requires a similar amount of effort to wooing an NPC."
The work so far has been focused on the "biggest technical hurdle" of synchronizing multiple games over the internet, and it has apparently been a huge job: Chucklefish said that 15,000 lines of code have been rewritten, and almost every source file has been impacted. But with that aspect of it almost finished, the work now will move to implementing the cabins, updating the UI and menus, figuring out multiplayer NPC relationships, and the usual "polish, testing, and optimization."
"We currently expect to be able to start a beta test at the end of the year for Steam users to help us test the game. Mod authors will be encouraged to update their mods during this beta period," Chucklefish said. "Then, in early 2018 we will release it as the 1.3 patch on Windows, Mac and Linux."
The will be released for consoles as well, but the studio warned that it "will be a bigger patch than usual," and so will take awhile to get to each platform.
When it comes to speedrunning, the intricate ways in which Dark Souls players expertly negotiate its hordes of hollowed monsters and nightmarish landscapes never fails to impress me. Stardew Valley, on the other hand, is not a game I'd automatically associate with speedrunning records.
But as reported by Kotaku, one player has shattered the game's previous 'marriage' record—whereby players rush to tie the knot as expeditiously as possible. Underscore76 now holds that record, having made it to the altar in just 26 minutes and nine seconds. Talk about a whirlwind romance.
Admittedly, I'm far from well-versed in Stardew marriage speedrunning, however Kotaku also suggests wooing Maru is a favourite of speedruns but that Shane—Underscore76's partner of choice—gets up early in-game and in turn serves to save time.
A glitch in the game also allows players who name themselves after specific ID item numbers to spawn those items whenever NPCs mention them by name. Underscore76 in turn spawned Prismatic Shards, bouquets and warp tokens in order to save time walking around.
If that causes confusion in writing, here's Underscore76's run in motion. And congratulations to the happy couple!
You might think Stardew Valley is a cute game about raising and caring for farm animals—but not every animal in the valley is living a peaceful existence. At this very moment, countless guinea pigs across every save file of Stardew Valley are suffering in silence. And this week, one rodent rabble-rouser decided enough was enough. If no one else was going to stand up for the defenseless furballs, they would.
The perpetrator of this unspeakable injustice is Abigail, the purple-haired bachelorette whose parents own Pierre's General Store. She's a sweet girl—ignoring all the animal abuse, that is.
"I am hoping Chucklefish and ConcernedApe may make this change to teach people how guinea pigs should be treated."
Buffy_B
If you've played Stardew Valley, you've visited her parents' store dozens of times. But did you know just beyond the shelves of seeds and groceries, animal rights are being abused on a daily basis? Near the back of Abigail's bedroom a small pixels-wide cage is the source of so much consternation for one player that they've decided to formally request that Eric Barone, the sole developer of Stardew Valley, make a series of changes to rectify the problem.
"This time around on my new farm, I decided to woo Abigail," explains Buffy_B on Reddit. "To my disappointment, Abigail is practicing some very irresponsible pet ownership." She begins her treatise by explaining that, contrary to what many think, guinea pigs are not "starter pets" and that they are "very time consuming and finicky."
But when it comes to Abigail's guinea pig, David Jr., it's obvious she doesn't have the first idea of how to take care of the poor critter. As Buffy_B lays out, Abigail is making three critical errors in caring for David Jr.
Guinea guinea never gets
David Jr. is in that tiny cage next to Abigail's dresser.
The first is that guinea pigs are herd animals and should never be alone. "In fact, in some countries it's considered so cruel to have a lone guinea pig that it's illegal to buy just one without having a friend for it. Having a lone guinea pig will decrease its lifespan," Buffy_B explains.
"Guinea pigs should never, ever have a wheel in its cage," Buffy_B adds. "Wheels can damage their spines and kill them. They are not like hamsters. Instead, they should have large cages that they can run around and also get supervised floor time so they can run and play with each other."
And finally: "Piggies should have [cubes and coroplast] cages, not aquariums. There isn't proper ventilation for them to breathe."
It's a damning series of infractions that Abigail has committed, so Buffy_B is asking Barone to issue an update that fixes these abuses so that David Jr. can live a happier life. "I am hoping Chucklefish and ConcernedApe may make this change to teach people how guinea pigs should be treated," Buffy_B says. "I ask you to please reconsider these three things in your game."
It's an interesting request, one that piggybacks on Mojang updating Minecraft so that players no longer feed parrots chocolate chip cookies to tame or breed them. Unbeknownst to the developers, chocolate is toxic to parrots, and members of the community were concerned that young children might mimic Minecraft and feed chocolate to real-life parrots. It was such a huge issue that the Reddit post calling for the change is the most upvoted thread of all time on the Minecraft subreddit.
Buffy_B's plea, however, has largely been met with "are you kidding?" After all, I can't imagine many people are looking to Stardew Valley to learn proper guinea pig care. David Jr. is about a pixel wide and you can't interact with him. In fact, the only reason players know what's in Abigail's cage is through dialogue.
"This is such a minor thing that I don't think it would be worth the 20 minutes it would take to change the assets for it," argues ThimonTheLuff. "Stardew is hardly a realistic game, and I'd argue that none of the farm animals, nor your own pets in the game, are treated responsibly. Like at all. If you want to you can decide to simply not feed them, leave them outside forever, let them freeze in the winter etc. The only real consequence of not taking care of your animals is that you wont profit from them. Hell, even when you get kids you don't have to actually dedicate any time to them."
Still, that didn't stop Buffy_B's post from being one of the most popular on the Stardew Valley subreddit, as players argued back and forth between the merits of whether or not a tiny guinea pig in a room could inspire real-life acts of animal negligence.
"I don't remember looking into it that deeply, and I was certainly unaware that the design of the cage would be harmful to a guinea pig in real life."
Eric Barone
But, despite all the bickering, there's plenty of questions I had for Stardew Valley's creator. Abigail might be an animal abuser, but Barone was the one who programmed her.
"I was a bit surprised when I first saw it, because it's not something that had ever crossed my mind before," Barone writes in an email. "Originally, I was going to have Abigail own a hamster, but then I thought to myself, 'hamsters seem kind of trendy right now, maybe I should do something different like a guinea pig.'"
But Barone's fatal mistake was not considering that guinea pigs have different needs than their furry cousins. "I don't remember looking into it that deeply, and I was certainly unaware that the design of the cage would be harmful to a guinea pig in real life."
Whether he's actually going to make the change, however, is still up in the air. "I haven't decided what to do about it yet. I certainly don't want my game to cause harm to any guinea pigs, but I'm also not sure if the mistake would actually result in that," he writes. "I'll have to think about it some more."
For now, despite all the rage David Jr. is still just a rat in a cage. If you happen to see Abigail, do PETA a favor and give her a handful of clay. She hates clay.
