Concerned Ape (Stardew Valley): I swear on the honor of my family name, i will never charge money for a DLC or update for as long as I live. Screencap this and shame me if I ever violate this oath.

The sad part is that the idea behind DLCs (to develop further content for a game already released, in exchange for additional money) is reasonable. Or it would be, if shitty developers didn't abuse it to the point that it stopped being "downloadable content" to become "dumb and lazy cashgrab".

I also think that CA isn't just being benign with this statement, or his whole "let us not be arseholes" approach towards development. He's being smart; player trust might be hard to measure but it has direct impact on word-of-mouth advertisement and piracy, so it's basically the difference between "everybody knows it, plenty bought it" and "the few ones who know it pirated it".

Based.

Though I would 100% be fine with paying for Stardew DLC, the base game is worth so much more than its current price

30 million copies sold. even if he only made a dollar into his pocket for each sale....hes doing alright.

The Ape family name is honorable

There is a difference between the DLC that is one and whatever the hell nowadays is practice. When its something like the eldenring DLC a dlc is absolutely fine.

That's fine for him, but let's not take this as a guideline for the entire industry.

There are plenty of talented, creative, and committed developers who are trying to turn their dream game into their life's work.

For most of them, the only way they can survive spending another 5 years working on the same title post-launch is by charging for the new stuff they make.

Such an incredible game and a great humble developer. Honestly, there’s nothing I can think of to do to improve the game from a gameplay mechanics standpoint, but there are a few technical back-end things I do wish it had :

Cross-platform compatible cloud-based save support. I want to be able to play in my same game save regardless of what system I play on. I don’t even mind paying for the game multiple times, but I want to have a singular Stardew account that I can sync somehow between PlayStation, Steam Deck, iOS, etc.
Cross-platform multiplayer. If I want to play on my Steam Deck and hop into my spouse’s farm on the Switch or whatever… or have them be able to do so on mine.
Mixing local and online co-op. If my kid wants to play with my spouse split-screen and I want to play on my desktop, again - would love to just be able to do so more seamlessly.
Dedicated server support.

I know at this point doing those things would be very hard from a technical standpoint since they’d probably require a lot of deep work in a code base that was not built to do any multiplayer to begin with, but I still would love if they could somehow do so or fork the base game to allow it to be done by the community.

I don’t think charging for content is the problem, it’s just the way some companies do it.

I mean this is great, props... But didn't he already make his nut with this game?? I mean I can play it on my fucking Tesla, I assume he got paid.

CA is too good for us.

I suppose that's nice. Although I do not see the problem with charging for updates, with multiplayer it's a problem because people might get pressured into buying something they might otherwise not get it because of friends, but with the single player game I can't see the issue. And why doesn't the dev deserve to be compensated?

If you violate the oath and make good paid DLC that's worth the price, I won't even be mad.

Fucking legend

The Factorio Devs made this Blogpost some time ago about how to go forward with development. It basically boiled down to developing a big (paid) expansion pack. I would be totally fine with Stardew Valley doing the same. However, going for free updates was discarded for Factorio because they have a "smaller but more dedicated audience [compared to Terraria and Minecraft]". I don't think that applies to Stardew Valley so free updates might be the way to go.

I miss old school “Expansions” like brood war etc

Rimworld devs sweatin' rn.

I appreciate it, and as a socialist I respect his attitude of “I’m rich off this so no need”, but also he’s done years of work to give us free stuff added to his game. If he had a paid expansion it wouldn’t be the worst thing.

I love Ape, and think he's one of the best devs out there.

I don't mind paid DLC like Elden Ring or Factorio 2.0, when it's basically a whole complete game on top of it. But anything micro transaction can go right to hell

This sounds like a therat/promise of seppuku. What a legend.

What about an expansion. Could I pay you for that please?

Permanently Deleted

Uhh... I guess it's not technically DLC, but ConcernedApe is selling the game soundtrack for $5 on Steam. It's in the game's DLC category, but unlike some other soundtracks on Steam, it's not dependent on owning the base game to purchase.

But it's also downloadable content, so it is DLC... I guess it depends on how you want to define DLC nowadays.