An important note with specifically Stardew Valley and a lot of the indie games coming out nowadays is that they release early; they work for up to a year, then release the game in Early Access to start the flow of money coming in so that they can both keep working on the game and get a lot of instant feedback.

I don't think that approach would work well with story-driven games, but for e.g. Stardew Valley and a lot of the infinite gameplay indie games being made nowadays it's ideal. Also, they will add features all the time, so people will come back to them on a regular basis (e.g. Factorio, KSP).