Terraria Heading To Retail, But For A Price

Terraria, the absolutely superb Minecraft-meets-side-scrolling-platformer, is to get a retail release. For, er, £20. The digital version costs £6 at most, regularly dropping to amazing bargain prices during various sales, and is unquestionably amazing value. But £20 for an "Exclusive Collectors Edition" when it's a year old, in a box, in a shop? That seems a little strange.

This is via Merge Games, who have previously provided publishing for Gemini Rue, and an awful lot of casual titles I've never heard of. Clearly Terraria is another powerful arrow in their quiver, if they can market it to the sorts that still use "shops", whatever those were.

This Collectors Edition (sic) comes with a mysterious, unnamed "in-game item", which I hope would be some awesome new weapon, a keyring in the shape of a pick axe, some trading cards (?) and a poster. Which really doesn't sound like £14 worth of content, to me.

Anyhoo, this strange thing is happening on the 16th March in the UK. Perhaps it will catch the eyes of the less hardcore audience, although while I'd be delighted about more people getting to play stuch a fantastic game, I'm somewhat concerned about their paying over three times as much as it should cost. Which they'll probably notice, as I'm sure it'll require a Steam connection to get the updates.