https://www.eurogamer.net/stardew-creator-wont-rush-haunted-chocolatier-better-to-have-a-good-delayed-game-than-a-bad-game-on-time
Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone says he's "not too concerned with the pressure" of releasing Haunted …
I will give Eric/ConcernedApe all of the patience and grace he asks for. Man is a good guy and legend of game development.
While this is a great attitude to have, it has to be tempered, because on the other end of the spectrum of waiting too long to release and having a both delayed and bad game like Duke Nukem Forever.
Also, with an indie game like this, you're less likely to run into the same issues they had with DNF such as trying to keep up with industry trends in first person shooters.
This isn't a big developer. There's no reason to temper this at all when the developer has a great track record for delivering quality.
And delivering above and beyond. 1.6 recently came out for Stardew Valley and the game has been out for 8 years.
CA is easily in the top list of all time greats for game development. It blows my mind that someone can have so much talent to write stories, draw pixel art, music and code the whole thing. Super talented!
Fr. Even if CA stopped development on SDV today and never developed another game, he would still be a legend in my book for the amount of love and talent put into SDV. Stardew is without question simply one of the best returns on investment (it's only $15!) available in gaming.
The issue with DNF is there's issue with its development, so arriving early or late, shit is going to be shit no matter how polished it is.
The issue that Haunted Chocolatier might find itself in is, when people waited for too long, the expectation of how good it is will be all over the place, or the hype is lackluster when people moved on after waited for too long. Though i genuinely doubt any of that will happen, he seems to really know how to communicate with the fans, so the hype might be "just right".
I don't think it's a concern, unless also like DNF, this property also got passed around multiple times before landing in someone's lap that actually had to finish it.
But someone might beat them to market with a game called “Swamped Confectioner”
Yahtzee Croshaw is almost finished with Starstruck Vagabond, which is supposed to be Stardew Valley on a spaceship. That being said, Yahtzee has already said he will won't be doing continual updates like Concerned Ape. He's only going to do bug fixes so he can move on to other games he wants to make
I didn’t realize he made games. I used to like his reviews. Are his games good?
Most of his games are experimental. He did a video series where he made 1 game per month for an entire year back when he still worked for The Escapist. I haven't played any of them, but from his videos they were all interesting ideas at least. I think those are still available on itch.io.
He also has a satirical game called Hatfall, which was mainly to poke fun at how many games have "fall" on the title. This one can be found on Steam if you're curious. My guess is that that's his actual preference for games. He's written a few books and they were all satirical comedies too.
He use to make point and click adventures! And newer ones, but I don't know those.
The point and click adventurers were...okay. I personally found them to fall into a lot of the problems those type of games have, which is "I am very bad at reading the mind of the creator to know which object to rub against such object to make things work"
I also didn't really like horror
Dude has to be a millionaire by now. Anything else he makes is just icing on the haunted chocolate cake.
I'd be shocked if Stardew didn't net him $100 million, it's sold more than 30 million copies.
$1,000,000 depending on context, isn't enough to comfortably live on forever. Especially if you're talking about net worth, and not available cash.
Even if it was cash, invested properly, you could expect to have $30,000 annually safely, which is basically minimum wage or less in many cities.
It's life changing money for sure, but I don't think you could say that being a millionaire means you're wealthy, it just means that you have a lot of freedom in life choices.
$1,000,000 depending on context, isn't enough to comfortably live on forever.
Not forever, but earning $1M over the span of a 2-3 years sets you up for a ton of success.
For comparison, engineers can expect to earn and average of $2.5-3.5M over the span of their careers in the US, depending on which type of engineer they are.
There was some back testing around the 4% rule, and for a normal retirement 4% was okay and historically only failed a couple times if you started in a specific month of a specific year and changed nothing as things turned bad.
For a longer term early retirement, 3.5% never failed.
Obviously, past performance cannot guarantee future performance, but $35,000 a year would probably be fine from that mil.
And this is assuming a properly diversified portfolio
It’s almost odd how rare this attitude is nowadays. I remember being excited for the next Blizzard Games release back in the day because you always heard them talk about quality over meeting arbitrary deadlines.
I get that being out there in the market early is important too. Investments need to pay a return with our current economic model. I just keep thinking of all the games that could have used a little more ripening and they likely would have been a lot more successful instead of losing the studio money.
The solo dev made a successful game, he's probably set for a long time and can afford to take all the time he wants.
Larger companies have, unfortunately, shareholders breathing down their necks.
