Why it matters: As a foundational title in the "cozy game" subgenre, Stardew Valley has remained one of the most successful indie games for much of the past decade. With Steam player counts higher than ever over the past year, Eric Barone's pixel art farming simulator now also holds the highest user rating on the platform.
Steam250.com, which uses data from SteamDB to calculate cumulative review scores, currently ranks Stardew Valley as the most positively reviewed game on Steam. The site gives the game a score of 8.87, based on a 98 percent positive rating from 901,000 reviews.
The rankings reveal an interesting trend among top-reviewed titles. Two main categories dominate the list. One includes popular indie games such as Stardew Valley, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Hades, Balatro, and Schedule I. The other features mostly Valve titles, including Left 4 Dead 2, Garry's Mod, and Half-Life 2. Notable outliers include Euro Truck Simulator 2, Black Myth: Wukong, and Baldur's Gate 3.
Indie games like Deltarune, ENA: Dream BB, and Bongo Cat are also among the top-rated releases of 2025. However, big-budget titles such as Split Fiction, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II also stand out.
Steam250 updates its rankings periodically, so Stardew Valley may not hold the top spot forever. Still, its popularity shows no signs of fading. Although it has long been a staple in the life simulation genre, the game's recent major update has taken its success to a new level.
Version 1.6, which added new events and a new type of farm last March, brought Steam player counts to an all-time high, eclipsing the numbers from Stardew Valley's initial launch. Furthermore, player counts over the past year have remained consistently above any period before version 1.6's release. The game also sits comfortably among Steam's top sellers and is the most played title on the Steam Deck.
However, gamers shouldn't expect another major update in the near future. Creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone recently shifted his attention toward his next game, the long-in-development Haunted Chocolatier.
Although Barone announced the chocolate shop management simulator in 2021, progress stalled due to his work on Stardew Valley 1.6, which includes recent hotfixes for the console versions.
Haunted Chocolatier still does not have a release date, and it is unclear when new details will emerge. Barone has previously stated that the game will center on a single town, similar to Stardew Valley, but will feature more action-oriented gameplay.