I'm interested. I've never played Harvest Moon so I have no notions of what's real or not.
OK so it's basically like this:
The real Harvest Moon games (known in Japan as Bokujou Monogatari or Farm Story) are developed by the company Marvelous (previously Victor Interactive Software, which got merged into Marvelous in 2003).
Outside of Japan, specifically in North America, the Bokujou Monogatari games were translated, distributed, and published by the company Natsume, who gave the series the English language title of Harvest Moon.
That was the situation literally for years, from the original 1996 Harvest Moon on the SNES (released in 1997 in the US) all the way until 2012's Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning on the Nintendo 3D. Victor Interactive Software/Marvelous develop the games and Natsume publish them in North America.
But then after Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, Marvelous decided to transfer the North American localization and distribution rights from Natsume to their own North American subsidiary, Xseed Games (whom they had acquired in 2011) Which makes sense, why have a third-party company continue to translate and publish your game in this region when you now have a subsidiary that can do it for you instead?
Except there's one small problem: Natsume still has ownership of the Harvest Moon brand name (and these games provided a significant chunk of their revenue as a publisher), so you can probably guess what this means.
Yeah, the games known as Bokujou Monogatari in Japan that were previously known as Harvest Moon outside Japan no longer can be localized under that title, with them now being known as 'Story of Seasons'. Meanwhile, Natsume has decided to create their own Harvest Moon games (well a different company is developing them) in order to maintain the brand recognition of Harvest Moon.
And uhh until their most recent one (which actually seems to be pretty decent), the Natsume-only Harvest Moon games...really weren't that good lol.