ConcernedApe

What ConcernedApe is

ConcernedApe is the professional name used by Eric Barone for his game development work. The company behind the name is ConcernedApe LLC, which the site's own terms of use describe as a Washington limited liability company. Barone works as designer, programmer, artist, animator, composer and writer on his games, and the official pages treat the studio as both the developer and the publisher of Stardew Valley. The name is used both for the person and for the company he set up to keep making games under it.

Stardew Valley is the studio's first and central title, and it is the game our database lists under ConcernedApe. The studio's main website is stardewvalley.net, which hosts the game's official FAQ, privacy policy, terms and shop information. A second site, hauntedchocolatier.net, is used for the studio's next project. ConcernedApe's public material is short on corporate detail: there is no company history page, and the FAQ is the main place where development and publishing questions are answered.

How Stardew Valley was made

The official FAQ states that Stardew Valley version 1.0 was developed completely solo by ConcernedApe over the course of four and a half years, and was released on 26 February 2016. The same page says the 1.1 update was also developed solo by Barone, and that from the 1.3 update onward other developers have helped with updates, with full credits shown in the game's title screen. There is no stated figure for the size of the current team, only the note that it exists.

Steam lists the game under developer and publisher ConcernedApe with a release date of 26 February 2016, which matches the FAQ. The FAQ also lists the platforms: PC, Mac and Linux, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android. The FAQ confirms that the game is written in C#, that it supports controllers on PC and full controller support on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, and that official merchandise partners are named on the same page.

Publishing and platforms

The FAQ answers the publishing question directly: Stardew Valley is self-published by ConcernedApe on all platforms. That is the position stated by the studio itself, and it is repeated by the Steam listing, where the same name appears in both the developer and publisher fields. On the studio's own news page, Barone posted that as of 24 October he had become the publisher of the Stardew Valley app on iOS, taking direct responsibility for it and for questions about it.

ConcernedApe LLC is named as the operator of stardewvalley.net and its subdomains in the site's terms of use, and the same document lists the game, the forum, the wiki, the shop and other online services as part of the studio's services. The company states that ConcernedApe, Stardew Valley and its logos are its trademarks. No parent company, investor or group ownership is named anywhere on the studio's own pages.

What comes next

On 8 October 2021 Barone announced a second game on its own website: ConcernedApe's Haunted Chocolatier. His announcement post describes a game about gathering ingredients, making chocolate and running a chocolate shop, and states that development had only recently started at that point. A later post on the same site says the project is written from scratch rather than sharing Stardew Valley's engine, that Barone is still working on it solo, and that he does not want to give a release date.

The studio also continues to support Stardew Valley. A September 2025 post on the Haunted Chocolatier site says another major Stardew Valley content update, version 1.7, is in development with a small team, and that Barone is taking more of a creative director role on it so he can concentrate on the new game. A post dated 30 August 2026 on the same site says work on Haunted Chocolatier was still in progress.

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