Stardew Valley Creator Opts To Self-Publish Game On Switch Amid Chucklefish Allegations

Wow, I am really sorry to hear this. I love Stardew and Wargroove! Easily two of the absolute best indie games to date! I'm really sad to hear that apparently, Chucklefish treats their employees so badly.

@StephanDLW true but sadly a lot of times such people need a big publisher to even be able to release a game on consoles, on PC that is less of an issue.

"community contributors were under no obligation to create content" and that "everyone was credited or remunerated as per their agreement"

Sounds to me like a few people decided to do work they weren't contracted for, then complained they didn't get paid for the extra work.

At my job, if the floor workers stay late without authorization, they're not gonna get paid overtime for it. Just sayin.

Idk who's right here, but it sounds like Chucklefish is if they're standing by their signed agreements. That's why they have those agreements. So when people come out saying "you didn't pay me for this" they can say "we didn't hire you for this, only for that".

@JaxonH they are 100% legally right. However, they did exploit the community. Sure, people who helped produce assets did it on their own, but they also thought that it might get them some credit or provide a step into the game-making business. Spoiler: it did not, neither it was a signed agreeement. And while chucklefish are right in the legal sense, they are still kinda unpleasant in the whole "people relations" part. And they are a publisher, this is one of the things, they should do right.

The fish has the last laugh.

I once worked at a football club as an online commentary and my boss also wanted me to manage his webpage during the summer. He told me how much he'll pay for that.
I did both those things.
We didn't have a contract in writing.
He never paid me anything.
Lesson learned.

(Also, cases like this belong to a court, not the social media.)

A pity. Stardew Valley and Wargroove are brilliant games, I want them to make more stuff!

I’m glad this information has emerged on social media. The legal system may not be able to rectify it but the court of public opinion can. Sometimes that’s the only power people have recourse to.

I want to know when my dollars will go to such people so I can make informed moral decisions.

Good on Mr. Barone, the person who actually created the game you love, for severing ties with Chucklefish.

I would never assume folks who once agreed to work for a company that seemed great in an industry they love would turn around and irresponsibly “whine” about such an issue on social media. They must have collectively sought to resolve their grievances, gotten what they perceived to be an unjust response, and escalated it in a way they thought appropriate. Why do so many people take the side of companies and corporations against the powerless in such situations? Are you all invested in exploitative corporate policies? Do you love the industry so little you can’t back positive change?

I’m ashamed of people in my gaming community who take stances against fairness. That says so much about a person.

ChuckleFish isn’t sounding too nefarious to me. ...Agreements exist for a reason. ...Developers just need to watch their a$$es and don’t fall in love with work. ...at least they have a decent resume piece for the next opportunity.

@Yorumi There’s a difference between illegally exploiting your workers and low-key, by-the-book exploitation. If Chucklefish are being shady, it should be brought to light.

If anything, this news makes me more frustrated with Nicalis. Stardew Valley was able to transition between publishers without leaving the eShop. Conversely, for Ittle Dew 2, the Switch supposedly did not have the “backend system” to facilitate the transition between publishers, according to Nicalis. Maybe the situation is different for both games, but I am less willing to believe Nicalis due to this info.

This story reeks of "agreements" of college apartment roommates.

He even said he may not have any substance to go after Chucklefish. That's like asking for a raise at Burger King cause you made an effort to skirt fries off the top to save the store money. You didn't sign off on it.

As @Yorumi has stated, he came out as if to retaliate. One an agreement he signed off on. Cause he likely knows his swath of fans will take just that and run, cause Twitter does that.

And we all know how this works out nearly every time.

This is why the idea of "community contribution" of free labor for commercial products was always an idiotic idea from the start, and only the semi-Communist "utopia" of the "shared everything" interent could have created such moronic ideas.

Meanwhile at Beyond Good & Evil 2....... Would you like the join Ancel's Space Monkey Club?

@JaxonH Exactly. If you take it upon yourself to do work or create content that wasn't pertaining to your agreement, how could you possibly expect to get paid? Just be thankful that you got some extra development experience so you have better chance of landing a good gig in the future. Extra work doesn't always equate to extra money no matter how many hours it was. Unless there is more information that we don't know, I am leaning towards the corporate side.

@nofriendo
Why do so many people take the side of companies and corporations against the powerless in such situations?

Because "being powerless" doesnt make you right, and "being a corporation" doesnt automatically make them in the wrong. And most people judge right and wrong based on actually being in the right or in the wrong, irrespective of who it is, as opposed to the intellectually shallow "they're a corporation so they're wrong, and they're just a person so they're right".

These people volunteered, then complained they didn't get paid for volunteer work. Idk what world you live in, but paying someone for something they agreed to do for free under threat of public shaming is not "fairness". In fact that's incredibly unfair, and frankly, downright evil.

From that statement, it sounds like he was already phasing chucklefish out before this happened... so... he’s really just making it clear they’re not related to the game.

I honestly don't see this as a bad thing for Stardew Valley and it's creator seeing as the creator is now also the sole publisher of the game.

ConcernedApe made an amazingly fantatstic game in Stardew Valley. I have put more hours in to that game on my Switch than I have probably any other game I own on that platform. If he wants to self publish, more power to him. I look forward to any new games he brings to us in the future.

@Yorumi There are plenty of projects one can volunteer on for all of those reasons that do not involve donating product to a company to sell for profit. That's why non-profit and non-commercial endeavors exist. Volunteerism and business don't mix. They were never meant to mix. One is the complete antonym of the other.

We don't know in this case if the company made promises or did not, but "community contribution" should not exist in the space of for-profit business to begin with regardless of what went down here, specifically to avoid the controversy that happened here.

@JaxonH Profiting from the unpaid labor of minors is not a good look. I’d rather discourage the practice, whether or not these teenagers should have known better than to expect somebody who got rich off their volunteer work to share the profits.

Not how I want my entertainment to be made.

@Rayquaza2510
Why is that the case nowadays?
With a digital storefront, isn't publishing just uploading the completed ROM to whoever owns the storefront (Valve/Nintendo/Microsoft), paying some kind of submission fee, and then sitting back and hoping it sells?

@JaxonH Sounds to me like another case of crunching... "You don't have to put in unpaid overtime, but if you don't, you'll be let go and no one will hire you again.".
"IF we recuperate costs we'll pay you your overtime" thinks to self, good luck with that in court, we won't give you a penny.

@NEStalgia Just because capitalism may be working in your favour, communal ideologies work better for the whole. What's the point in capitalism if it always quickly becomes crony capitalism?

Tell the truth This seems a copy of minecraft or somthing.

@Yorumi What you’re ungenerously calling stupidity I would more accurately describe as naiveté, or lack of professional savvy, which in 16-year-olds should probably be forgiven.

And I would argue that whatever indulgence of stupidity you want to draw the line at, is nowhere near as grave an ill to society as the rewarding of greed and exploitation.

These volunteers have learned a difficult lesson.

Finn Brice has learned that free labor from teenagers pays.

That your desired outcome?

@Jayofmaya Communal ideologies work beautifully.....as an ideology. Once you throw humans into the mix it's instantaneously corrupted and turned into a house of horrors, as history proves, without fail, over and over again.

That's always been the problem with it. On paper it's a hard set of ideas to disagree with, it works for everyone pretty well, so long as it's viewed through the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance and human nature is disregarded.

But putting it into practice involves humans, and humans will inherently distort it to favor themselves as a matter of human nature. Just like Capitalism, except at least Capitalism gives incentive for them to all fight against one another which creates some sense of balance to the system, where communal systems encourage them to work together against the masses, with no risk of outside interference. "Crony capitalism" is a cute way of saying "Fascism", which is itself merely a cute way of saying "National Socialism" - the actual underlying system of both, and the kissing cousin of Communism itself, as Lenin attempted to point out. The core problem you, and most, are feeling with modern capitalism is that it's not actually capitalism at all, it's a "crony capitalism", a.k.a. "Fascism". A communal ideological system masquerading as capitalism. Which is why Mussolini coined it "Fascism." It's a facade. A front, creating the illusion of free enterprise where in fact none exists and is controlled from the top down. The modern implementation of "crony capitalism", however, is really much closer to Feudalism and a return to a caste system than it is to either pure Fascism/National Socialism or "Capitalism" however.

I don't think it's fair to call any Western system a "capitalism" - none of them are. Pretending it is just makes it easier to keep the illusion going. "Capitalism" died when small proprietorships nearly vanished. Now that it's all global corporations run by shareholders which themselves are controlled by banks & funds, there's a select few who really control all commerce in what I'd call a "semi-command economy.", where just enough "capitalist" activity is permitted until they pull the leash.

@ShinyUmbreon what are you talking about...?

(Though thinking again, do I really want to know?)

@nukatha no it is not that easy on consoles.

@Yorumi Crony/Fascism/Socialism/Communism/Collective ideologies are always problems of government power. Always have been

Though it's a little different, which is why I liken this version to Feudalism/caste systems. It started as you say but it's different now. With the global corporations (themselves owned by banking cartels ) in total control of government it works in reverse. More like noble houses that really act as the power behind the throne. In a pure national socialism/Fascism government is the power of all things including business. This new system is the inverse....private finance is the power behind government and business combined which in turn is the power behind all things. Much more like feudal lords and noble estates. Or worse, the unholy union of collectivist 20th century ideas, melded with old feudal European structure.

Games are probably the wrong example, partly because while games are products they also have art value, and art value has largely always floated past all the systems of control. But in any material goods, without the scale of economy of a global corporation one couldn't compete against a global corporation.

Your description rang more true, 20, 30 years ago. But we've rapidly devolved into something much worse since the global push. I don't think the past of "it tends to fix problems" applies the same way anymore. 30 or 40 years ago, no company except maybe defense contractors had the scale and power the modern corporation does. Something changed drastically in that time. Again, keeping in mind, there's really no such thing as "coprorate power" - corporations are just pawns and tools of the investors, and the investors almost always trace back to the same banks and funds for majority shares. It's a "banker caste" that really calls the shots. That's not a new problem. That's the very same old problem Jefferson warned to watch out for and we failed to do to catastrophic results.

However the shining, undeniable confirmation that it has miserably failed is the growing commonality of people, such as above, that find the Marxian theories an upgrade despite all the evidence. Those theories only thrive in places that the system failed so colossally that people find that to be a desirable alternative. I don't mind Marx's theories so much. He never actually designed a working government, he was just an academic theorist defining a theoretical fix, mixed with ignorance of the human condition. He actually did very astutely define the problems of the free market system....he wasn't actually wrong there. It was his solutions to such problems that were actually worse than the problem he was trying to solve, largely by foolishly believing people would always act in good faith of everything...but credit where credit is due, his analysis with flaws of free market is not as incorrect as later champions of the status quo like to pretend. But nobody's made an actual useful improvement based on that critique, to date.

All that said, I've never liked the "it's the best system ever despite it's flaws." That's not much of a statement but is dressed up to suggest the status-quo is also a pseudo ideal. At one time (talking more Rome and so forth than the US), slavery was the best system ever despite it's flaws. Any terrible system can be determined to be the best when alternatives are even worse.

Free market was a well balanced system until globalism and the consolidation of corporate power. The problem with capitalism is it's a monodirectional trip toward, eventually, communism. ALL the systems become that. They are different mechanisms that forestall the concentration of wealth and power, but eventually it all amasses anyway. No system truly works unless it has a mechanism to reset and cycle back to low concentration. The main difference now is capitalism takes a long time to concentrate that power. Communism does it at the start by force....it kind of starts at the end.

Let's move on to a different subject, shall we? We don't need to delve too deep into any of this here

@Yorumi having looked a little into it, it seems like the person put in a bunch of hard work in hopes that it would get them a real position on project but it didn’t and now they’re mad about it.

@JaxonH your analogy isn't even right. companies don't want you working overtime without authorization, but if you do, they are still legally required to pay you for it. if your company isn't doing that (and yeah, there's a good chance they're not, because most workers can't afford to lawyer up to make their employers comply with the law), that is illegal wage theft.

"community contributors were under no obligation to create content"

Sounds like Chucklefish is pushing the legal language they think they need to get away with not paying their employees for work.

The question that I have is.......can we have the game released on the western Switch as a physical!? ☺️

I'm not sure if anybody has made this point already: the volunteers signed up to do the work willingly without the foreknowledge that Starbound was going to be a success...

I'm going to be cynical and say that if the game had instead bombed, all these poor souls who are now complaining about being unpaid would never have complained about it; they'd just accept they did free work for the experience and to boost their portfolios (just like at the point when they signed the agreement).

My view is that these volunteers are exploiting the court of public opinion's recognition of Starbound's success to extort money from Chucklefish...

@Purgatorium Do you have proof that the people in question were employed?

@Yorumi Nice to see a well thought out and written response. I've been getting into politics, and yeah I'm seeing this kind of thing/situations more often. I agree mob mentality and or morality is bad, and as said in some other prior posts, it's wrong to assume guilt (or truth) just because it's a person versus a corporation, or say a woman vs a man, etc.

I agree that the existing system shouldn't just be tossed out (not until a better system is found), and there is a growing problem with school debt. I think the fault lies in three main areas, universities/trade_schools/etc way overpricing education, banks lending out too much money to people who can't afford it, and kids not understanding the true value of money. You could add parents not warning their kids, though back even just what, 20-30 years ago my parents could go to school for like a couple hundred a semester. There's been some inflation, but DANG not that much. I will say that per student loans, that one is harder to 'know' from a students' POV until you're actually paying all your own bills, have your own place (dorms don't count as you're still paying for it on credit/loans), living on your own, etc, which is sometimes post college. Until then I don't think people have a true understanding of just how much university is actually costing them, in relation to true cost of living, how much money you lose at the start from taxes, etc.

I feel like the more people who get themselves in this trouble though, the more people who are tempted to blame the system, want to overthrow it, or overhaul it (so that the government manages takes care of everything for you, which has potential to become corrupted and/or people to become overly dependent on the system), thinking it's the system that failed them over the points I mentioned. And the whole victim mindset and mentality is not helping people grow up or prepare for the real world, in which it's better to become independent and take responsibility for your actions. I agree that it's tough though if you get yourself stuck in a lot of debt, certainly makes the road back much harder. While some of it is corporate/school/bank greed, we do have to own up and take at least some kind of responsibility for our actions, though. It's a hard situation and a growing problem. These days, I don't think I can recommend university to most people (thankfully community colleges still seem reasonably priced). Thankfully, you can learn a dang lot online for free, through just watching YouTube videos. Another good source I found is Udemy, wait for a sale, and you can get 3-20 hrs of video instruction for like $11-15.

Chucklefish Commits Wage Fraud.

@nofriendo The problem with the court of public opinion is that it generally is a court of the heart and not law. We don't know the whole story. We get an algorithm washed social media slanted view of the facts. In a court of law the facts would come out. If the company exploited contributors, we'd KNOW it. If they didn't, we'd KNOW it. In the court of public opinion, we never KNOW it, we just get to feel it. Taking your dirty laundry to social media isn't any different than review bombing a game because you're mad at the company.

Hey Chucklefish....still waiting on French language support in the Switch version!!

"Chucklefish responds to allegations it exploited volunteer Starbound developers"
You had me at "exploited VOLUNTEER". Nothing to see here, move along.

Holy cow this like a type along battle..

@DeltaPeng

Uh... should I?

@Purgatorium Well, you're claiming that they were employed (and therefore should receive money). If you can prove it your claim would have more weight.

If you can't, then per Chucklefish the people were community contributors, not employees, and so should not have expected payment.

@DeltaPeng

I think "proving" that they are employed might actually go against my point. At the very least it wouldn't do much to help it.

@Purgatorium Maybe I'm missing your point then, since I don't see how aiming to prove the people in question were employed would go against it.

From what I gathered, you imply that Chucklefish is pushing legal language to avoid paying 'their employees'. One doesn't typically have any obligations to give money to volunteers or strangers for work done, only employees or those you have an agreement with (for legal purposes, should be a written agreement). If you can't prove they had a written agreement for pay or were employed, or even that chucklefish ever said they would ever pay them at all, why are you assuming/implying that Chucklefish is guilty party or that they have committed some wrongdoing?

...Alright, just looked up some articles:
Oh, and as a heads up I like to write a lot, It's not personal, it's just something I do. Better to explain a point well or practice doing so, anyway..
https://www.pcgamer.com/chucklefish-responds-to-allegations-it-exploited-volunteer-starbound-developers/

"Composer Clark Powell also tweeted to say that they "almost did the audio and music" for Starbound until he was informed that it was an unpaid job."

And then from Chucklefish:
"...During this time both the core crew and community contributors were collaborating via a chat room and dedicated their time for free. Community contributors were under no obligation to create content, work to deadlines or put in any particular number of hours. Everyone was credited or remunerated as per their agreement."
...
Reece acknowledged signing a contract, saying that contributors were required to do so if they wanted to work on the game, and that they were further enticed with the promise of possible employment at Chucklefish in the future.

• • -
    That said, it's like signing an agreement to work an unpaid internship (so that you get some professional work experience), but the tradeoff is no pay. In this case, some people had to sign the agreement in order to be allowed to work on the project at all, so the 'pay' you get is essentially the experience. That is not as good as the experience + $, but it's still something, by working on Starbound and/or getting to see source code (for programmers) or mayhaps even just the gist of how to create good professional quality art for a game, you potentially learn the gist of how to create a game like Starbound on your own. Since it was a big hit, that also makes that information/experience more valuable. I do a bit of gamemaking as a hobby on the side, I'm curious to see what the code and organization of it all is like, but they'd never let me see it (for free) as it's essentially their goods and services, their confidential material. So being able to see and work with it does have some value. And, while not $, you do at least get your foot in the door and get some real world experience, which you can claim and can legitimately help you get a job in the game dev world (particularly since it was a success). It's hard to claim you should have been paid after the fact, after signing an agreement that you're open to working without pay. You could argue that, since Starbound became a large success, the company OUGHT to have thereafter, paid their volunteer workers, but it's not an obligation since the workers were clearly aware ahead of time that they wouldn't be paid. It'd be a smarter and perhaps more humane thing to do for Chuckfish to retain loyalty, assuming they liked the work that was being made and wanted to see more contributions from those people. But it's harder to do it after the fact. and it's not like these people didn't have a choice, Clark Powell opted not to contribute because he wouldn't be paid, the others could have done the same. A likely problem is, since they weren't planning on being paid, they probably did not track their hours. That said, if you can't verify how much work or time they actually contributed, it'd be hard to find a fair amount to pay them.

Unfortunately, companies are kind of dumb, not paying their loyal employees fair wages at times, and so they leave, and the company loses valuable experience. They could've still given them something, like hey here's a a couple dozen free keys to the game so you can give it to your friends and fam, or here's a few hundred dollar gift card or something. But based on the circumstances and since they have an agreement AND they were clearly aware ahead of time it would be free work, I'd say Chucklefish has no legal or moral obligation to do so. They burn bridges, lose loyalty, and may look bad by not doing it, but they appear to have been quite clear/upfront on the pay side of things beforehand.

It's a bit of a gamble. Someone who worked to create Microsoft in it's starting days (say...idk, 40-60 years ago) can't just go up to Bill Gates and demand that they be given millions of $ because Microsoft is as big as they are now and hence their work back then was actually a ton more valuable than the amount they were being paid for at the time. For one that'd be a pain to manage, but also that's the purpose of written agreements, you give us time for $x/hr. But on the plus side, if a company bombs they can't go back to their workers and ask for their money back (since the product failed). It's a risk business owners and employees take, they hire you cause they hope they'll be able to eventually make more money than the initial large costs it took to get started.

That's part of why salary negotiation (in any job) can be important. While they may not have money, sometimes businesses offer other incentives, ie. startup companies, since they don't have money to start, they offer shares of the company to their employees. If you will work for free BUT want to be paid if the game is wildly successful, you need to negotiate that ahead of time (define wildly successful, some games like Telltale were quite popular, studio still went broke). But it has to be decided beforehand. Most likely most of these volunteers were just random people with no videogame experience to start. In the article it was clear, either you're open to working for free or you don't work on the project at all. It's their project, they can state the terms of who they allow onboard. Just because someone works for a company doesn't mean they actually contributed or did much to progress the project along, and if they did, then they undersold themselves by agreeing to work for free. But if (say) Chucklefish had 200 people who were open to volunteering their time for free, and say 1,000 that would only work for pay, and they only needed 50 people, it makes complete sense that Chucklefish would just work with the free people (first), per supply and demand and budget constraints (at the time). Why pay someone $ to do the job if you have an abundance of people who are willing to do it for free, and if you didn't actually want to do it for free, you could argue that Chucklefish would've just moved on to the next volunteer and then you wouldn't have gotten a chance to work with them at all.

If you wanted something else, or a condition to get paid if the game was successful, you need to negotiate beforehand so both parties know what they are getting into and what obligations are involved. If you contributed, then if anything, you got the (professional) game dev experience which may help to actually getting a job in the field later, which does have some merit and value. If your work ended up being major such that the project could not have been done without you...well likely you would have been hired by them. But if not, then mayhaps you undersold your ability by agreeing to work without pay (you didn't know or properly promote the value you could bring to the team and why you should be paid such that they'd select you over someone else who'd be willing to work for free). Or perhaps you did know it, but they (and mayhaps other companies) wouldn'tve given you a chance since you had no professional experience, but now you do, so it's more likely you may get hired in the future or at least standout from others who want the same opportunity (it's that lame catch 22 some entry level jobs have. They want a new hire with x years of experience, but how can you get that without first being hired?? Though technically most companies understand that and would potentially hire you (i.e send in your resume anyway, sometimes they just state preferences over actual requirements, so don't let that scare you from applying. You could fall way below the preferences, but if they still think you could be a good fit you could still get a chance). That's partly where internships come in, or working your own side project and making a demo / portfolio to show you can actually work and be productive and get something done which you set your mind to. People who want to create videogames are , well, I'd say a good majority of almost every gamer. Those who actually can or have worked on projects are a very small number)

tldr;
(if you don't mind me irreverently poking a bit of fun and humor of the situation, this came to mind:) employment contracts exist to avoid workers, x amount of time/years later, coming back as Adventure Time Squirrels ;p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iryLTDK-Ghs