Stardew Valley has basically become the Tolkien of cozy gaming
It happens multiple times a week in online fantasy reader circles: Someone says they're new to fantasy, or a former avid reader returning as an adult, or otherwise looking to join the space by asking what they should read first. The answer that fantasy fans love to give, inevitably, is The Hobbit. I see it often enough that it almost feels like a gag, but so many fantasy lovers still really do think you should start with Tolkien.
There's a similar phenomenon in cozy gaming circles where new or returning gamers ask where they should begin and unless they give caveats that would eliminate it (and sometimes even if they do) the favorite answer from cozy gamers, perhaps even more unanimously than Middle Earth to fantasy fans, is Stardew Valley.
Stardew Valley is officially 10 years old this week and is still treated as the default entry point to this corner of the hobby. Even with its overnight success back at launch in 2016, becoming the poster child of the genre it revitalized wasn't a given.
I remember putting a lot of hours into H1Z1 around the same time as Stardew, arguably the first battle royale to really put the shrinking death circle concept on the map even though it took inspiration from things like Minecraft Hunger Games servers and Arma 2. For a variety of reasons, it was completely supplanted by Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite within a couple years and nobody talks about H1Z1 anymore.
As the list of games like Stardew Valley kept growing, I thought the same could eventually happen. Some other indie farm sim would come along and do everything just a bit better. Or else the Story of Seasons developers, formerly of Harvest Moon, would crash into the PC market screaming "daddy's home!" Neither of those things have really happened.
In the years since Stardew I've found a few other farm life sims that I think really capture the same warmth and competency—Roots of Pacha and Fields of Mistria are the top tier in my book—but none have managed to overtake that status as the default. Even as more Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon games both come to PC, they haven't quite modernized enough to overtake Stardew's ubiquity.
More than just persisting as the de facto entry point, Stardew Valley continues to occupy a The Hobbit-like first-love space in the hearts of a lot of cozy gamers. It's the comfort game I can return to year after year when I tire of trying other new farm sims. It's the ones whose little idiosyncrasies I've memorized and the one I can quote verbatim.
I can't say exactly what it is that's kept Stardew on the cozy throne instead of accidentally drawing the blueprint for its own usurpurs. It could be that, like Minecraft, the prolific modding community has kept players engaged way past the expiration of other games. Maybe the years of free updates, with a 1.7 update still coming, have built enough goodwill to cement its indie darling status indefinitely. Maybe it's that so many games like it burn through attention with lengthy early access periods or maybe everyone just really loves the soundtrack.
At this rate, it seems pretty likely that we'll all meet back here in 2036, with Stardew Valley's spot as king of cozy games still unchallenged, to talk about how Haunted Chocolatier stacks up and what we hope Eric Barone is planning for that Stardew Valley 2 he's never ruled out working on someday.