Clarification on the relationship between Chucklefish and Stardew Valley

Hi everyone,

This is Eric Barone (aka ConcernedApe), creator of Stardew Valley.

I am aware of the news and social media reports that Chucklefish allegedly engaged in unfair and potentially abusive labor practices during development of their game, Starbound. I feel the need to address this situation because the connection between Chucklefish and Stardew Valley, as well as the degree to which Chucklefish was involved in the creation of the game,  has been a source of confusion for many people . So I’d like to clarify a couple of things.

Throughout the 4.5 years of development, I was the only person to work on Stardew Valley. Neither Chucklefish nor any contributors working with Chucklefish were involved in creating the game, in any capacity.

For the multiplayer update, which came out on PC 2.5 years after the game first launched, a Chucklefish employee did create the multiplayer net-code, but that was the only case where Chucklefish was directly involved in development of the game.

Beyond that, Chucklefish has served only as publisher, which means that they handled the business and marketing side of things, as well as contracting the localizations, console & mobile ports to 3rd-party companies. Since December of last year, I’ve moved to self-publishing on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox, and PSVita… Chucklefish is no longer publishing the game on those platforms.

I can also say that, both personally and in my capacity as the recent founder of a small team, I believe in compensating developers for their contributions in working on games.