Vulture interviewed Eric Barone the mastermind behind Stardew Valley:

How a First-time Developer Created Stardew Valley, 2016's Best Game to Date

If you check out the list of top-selling titles on Steam, the online game-distribution juggernaut, one game sticks out. Whereas the rest of the list is populated mostly with the most recent entries in the long-running, big-studio Hitman and GTA and Tom Clancy franchises, sitting inexplicably in the #2 spot is Stardew Valley, a game with pixelated SNES-style graphics, a meandering pace, and the simple core mechanics of planting and watering and cultivating different crops over and over and over as the days and seasons pass. It does not sound like a blockbuster. And yet it is — more than 550,000 people have downloaded it in the two and a half weeks since it was released.

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In other words, cooking exists to provide players with health and energy — to encourage them to indulge in the core mechanics of farming, mining, and fishing. He didn’t want the kitchen to be a click-click-click profit-maximizing feature. Both decisions align with Barone’s vision for the sort of behavior games should encourage: not mindless clicking and maximum efficiency, but something more thoughtful and slower-paced and conducive to wonder. And when you’re a one-man team, you get to make whatever decisions you want. A game like Stardew Valley, Barone said, is “a lot more personal than a game made by a hundred people that’s some kind of focus-tested experience where they just want to make as much profit as possible.”

But as things turned out, profit wasn’t a problem. After Stardew Valley dropped on February 26, Barone watched in awe as the sales numbers rushed skyward. Thanks in part to the fact that Barone’s publisher, Chucklefish, had aggressively marketed the game to popular Twitch and YouTube personalities who streamed early builds, Stardew Valley was on a lot of radars, and both sales and plaudits quickly began rolling in. Even taking out Chucklefish’s cut and whatever special offers have helped build momentum, 550,000 units sold at $15 a pop means Barone has earned a generous retroactive salary for the last four years and ensured himself a future as an independent game developer.

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Thanks Eye!