Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone has announced plans to self-publish the country-life RPG on all platforms, starting with Android. The announcement comes straight from the creator’s Twitter page following the announcement of developer Chucklefish returning the final Stardew Valley publishing rights to ConcernedApe.
Chucklefish announced its departure from Stardew Valley in a blog post detailing its business ventures with Barone, who goes by the alias ConcernedApe, and giving thanks to other partners and everyone involved with the game and its various ports. The blog also shares the amount of content that has come from the joint effort of Chucklefish and ConcernedApe, such as new language support, wiki development, multiplayer mode, content releases, physical releases, and the mobile version.
This exit of Chucklefish comes three years after Barone distanced himself from Chucklefish in the wake of allegations that the publisher exploited workers on 2016’s Starbound. During this time, Barone stated that he was the only person to work on Stardew Valley, with Chucklefish only acting as publisher.
The dsparture of Chucklefish from the series leaves ConcernedApe as the sole developer and publisher of the series on all digital platforms, including Android. This development left fans with questions such as whether the 1.5 mobile update is still coming to the title, to which ConcernedApe responded with a “yes.”
“I will never abandon the 1.5 mobile update,” ConcernedApe states. “Even though it’s taken way too long (I freely admit this), I will see it through. I have not forgotten it. I think about it every day. It’s a somewhat complicated situation.”
It’s not clear what the future of Stardew Valley holds with ConcernedApe self-publishing it and the upcoming Haunted Chocolatier, but fans of the title seem to have a bit to look forward to with further Android updates and a new game coming.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.