Chucklefish returned the rights to the mobile version of the game to Eric Barone, the creator of Stardew Valley. Now he has nothing to do with the publisher, whose reputation has been damaged in recent years.
Recall that Chucklefish acted as the publisher of Stardew Valley since 2013 (the game itself was released in 2015). The company took over the marketing, localization and porting of the project in exchange for 10% of sales.
Since 2018, the rights to the editions of the game began to return to the Baron. First, publishing rights were returned on all major platforms except Switch. In April 2019, Eric also had them.
And now the indie developer has reached an agreement to get back the rights to the Stardew Valley edition on iOS and Android. As the Baron noted on Twitter, he has just begun to delve into the work of mobile platforms.
Mobile devices are usually not an important source of income for ports of indie games with Steam. However, Stardew Valley is an exception. Only in the first three weeks of sales in 2020, the iOS version of the game earned around $ 1 million.
Baron is currently working on his second game, Haunted Chocolatier. The project is at an early stage of development, there is no official release date. According to the developer, the new game will have some connection with Stardew Valley.
Chucklefish was one of the most prominent publishers on the indie scene in the late fifties. Most of his small portfolio is recognizable phenomenon games. However, in 2019, the company got into a scandal. The developers of Starbound accused the management of Chucklefish of non-payments.