On March 19, the PC version of Stardew Valley received patch 1.6 with several hundred changes and a large portion of new content. The release of the update shook up the community, and as a result, online games on Steam grew to an all-time high of 146,159 people.
Stardew Valley
For comparison, on the eve of the patch release, almost three times fewer people played in Stardew Valley. According to SteamDB, on March 18, a maximum of 55,026 Steam users were in the farm simulator at the same time.
Stardew Valley set the previous record in January 2021. It amounted to 94,879 thousand people.
The dynamics of Stardew Valley online on Steam, according to SteamDB
Now Stardew Valley is the most popular game on Steam with the tag "farm simulator". She beat such major titles as Farming Simulator 22 and Dave the Diver. Their peak online on Steam is 105,636 people and 98,480 people, respectively.
Top 10 games with the tag "farm simulator" by peak online size
Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone announced patch 1.6 back in 2022. In April 2023, he announced that he had interrupted the development of his next game, Haunted Chocolatier, for a patch. He later said that there would be so many innovations that it would be better for players to start a new playthrough.
Due to the abundance of changes, patch 1.6 pulls in a full-fledged addition. Stardew Valley has several festivals, another type of farm, new animals and items, hundreds of new lines of dialogue for NPCs and much more.
So far, patch 1.6 has been released only on PC. It is not known exactly when it will be released on consoles and mobile devices, but the developer promised not to delay this and release the patch as soon as possible.
Note that now Stardew Valley is on sale with a 20% discount. This also partly contributes to the growth of the game's audience.