Terraria’s wild popularity means its devs still can’t give it up - but not for lack of trying
12 years and multiple final updates later, the 2D sandbox game continues to “sell like hot cakes”.
Is there such thing as too much success? In the case of smash-hit 2D Minecraft-a-like Terraria, its devs at Re-Logic might agree - they’ve apparently been trying to stop developing it for years, but it just won’t stop being so darn popular.
That’s per Re-Logic head Andrew Spinks, who told followers of his since-deactivated Twitter account that “there is so much demand it makes it hard to move on" from the 2011 brick-mining-and/or-building game.
“After 12 years the game still sells like hot cakes," Spinks added. Those hot cakes are served on top of Terraria’s already staggering 44 million-plus sales as of 2022. In 2021, that number was 35 million, with around half of those sales on PC - meaning that the game may’ve added another 10 million or so sales if it kept up that momentum into 2023, which it sounds like it has.
Of course, Terraria is second only to Doom in terms of where you can play it, coming to every imaginable console, mobile platform and even the gone-but-also-forgotten Google Stadia over the last decade-plus.
As if making a boatload of money wasn’t good enough, Terraria is also widely beloved, becoming the first game on Steam to receive over one million user reviews and maintain an “Overwhelming Positive” rating as of last summer. More importantly, it's both one of our favourite survival games of all time - and one of yours, too.
That sounds like a terrible problem to have, honestly, and it’s one that Re-Logic has been desperately trying to remedy by releasing “final” updates for Terraria since at least 2015.
Business and marketing chief Ted Murphy told PC Gamer that update 1.3 was originally intended to be the last big release for Terraria - adding an Expert mode, achievements, hundreds of items and more besides - before the game’s enduring popularity led to eight more years (and counting) of additions both big and small.
That includes another “final” update in the form of 2020’s not-so-fittingly-titled Journey’s End, a huge update that added proper mod support and two new modes, along with over 1,000 new items and hundreds of bug fixes, plus golf. It only took a few months for another “final” update, Journey's Actual End, to follow.
Surprise, surprise: that still wasn’t the end of things. After a crossover with fellow indie survival sandbox darling Don’t Starve, last year saw the release of the Labor of Love update in response to the game winning the player-voted Steam award of the same name. (That darn popularity!)
Since then, there’s been the announcement of an official Terraria board game, along with plans for another crossover - this time with roguelite platformer Dead Cells - in what Re-Logic is now describing as the absolutely-definitely-no-for-real-this-time last major update and “final stretch” for the game in patch 1.4.5.
"At some point, it feels right to start work on a second project," Murphy remarked, before admitting that the team will “never say never” to yet more updates for Terraria. "When will Terraria’s final update truly happen? I don’t even think we can say that with certainty."
As it happens, Terraria is half price on Steam right now, if you somehow haven’t already bought it and want to bind its devs to another decade of punishing popularity and financial success.