The point folks are making is that Stardew was finished on release, it's just that the developer has the passion and financial ability to continue to improve it.

If it was 1994, maybe the game would have been released on a cartridge and never changed for myriad reasons (publishing rights, being on physical media, etc).

Example: Super Metroid was one of the best games ever made, and was complete when it was released, but you better believe I'd take free updates that further improve on it. There's always improvements to make, because nothing can really be perfect. Those hypothetical updates wouldn't retroactively make it an incomplete game. Maybe it's too a subtle philosophical point

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

As another example, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the best game ever made, in my opinion. But there's a laughable amount of glitches in it and speedrunners can easily tear the game apart. So it's not perfect. It's also old and the graphics are dated. If it were somehow still supported today, there would be a high-resolution texture pack released, no doubt about it...