Stardew Valley Dethrones Portal 2 to Become Steam’s Highest-Rated Game of All Time

Stardew Valley (Image Credit: Steamdb/ConcernedApe)

After nearly a decade of cozy farming, fishing, and befriending townsfolk, Stardew Valley has hit a massive milestone — it’s now the highest-rated game of all time on Steam, officially overtaking Valve’s legendary Portal 2.

This new ranking comes from Steam250, which tracks the top games on Steam based on user reviews. As of July 9, Stardew Valley holds a score of 8.87 with an impressive 899,986 reviews backing it up. Portal 2, which held the crown for about 14 years, now sits just behind at 8.85 with 436,665 reviews. The margin is razor-thin, but the result is clear — Stardew has taken the top spot.

For longtime fans of Stardew Valley, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The game has only grown more popular over time, especially after big updates like version 1.6, which brought fresh content and even more reasons to start a new farm (or come back to your old one). Last year, it even broke its all-time player peak with nearly 236,614 players logged in at once — not bad for a game released back in 2016 by a single developer.

While Portal 2 is still widely loved — and definitely deserves its iconic status — the shift in rankings shows just how powerful player-driven support can be. And it’s not just the top two battling it out. Terraria follows closely in third with a score of 8.82 and over a million reviews, with People Playground, Left 4 Dead 2, and Vampire Survivors rounding out the top of the list.

Steam's top-rated games (Credit: Steam250)

It’s worth noting that the rankings can look slightly different depending on where you check. Over on SteamDB, Stardew Valley is still in second place, just 0.06 points behind Portal 2. But either way, it’s sitting comfortably among the platform’s best-reviewed games.

Meanwhile, developer Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone is still hard at work on his next project, Haunted Chocolatier. Nonetheless, he intends to keep supporting Stardew Valley. Speaking to NPR earlier this year, Barone revealed that he doesn’t see himself ever fully walking away from the project. "I don’t want to definitively say the book is ever closed," he said, jokingly adding, "Maybe even 50 years from now, I might add something."

He recently shared that the Haunted Chocolatier’s world will be even bigger than Stardew Valley, though we still don’t have a release date.