Andrew Spinks, the co-creator of Terraria, announced that his studio would no longer be working on a Google Stadia port of the game, he announced on Twitter earlier today. The reason: his studio, Re-Logic, has been locked out of its associated Google and YouTube accounts for “over three weeks” without any explanation and with little recourse from the company.
Early Monday, Spinks tweeted that he had “not done anything to violate your terms of service, so I can take this no other way than you deciding to burn this bridge.” In the thread, Spinks says the lockout has cost him access to “thousands of dollars of apps” he purchased, and his Gmail account, which he used for more than 15 years, is gone, too.
I absolutely have not done anything to violate your terms of service, so I can take this no other way than you deciding to burn this bridge. Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward.
— Andrew Spinks (@Demilogic) February 8, 2021
According to Spinks, he first flagged that he lost access to his accounts on or around January 16th and even used the game’s official Twitter account to call on YouTube to provide additional information, but to no avail. The official Terraria account did have a perplexing back-and-forth with the @TeamYouTube account on January 26th, but there appears to have been little help offered beyond the suggestion that the team follow standard account recovery guides.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Terraria is a side-scrolling action-adventure sandbox game that was initially released in 2011 on PC. Despite the game being almost 10 years old, it still receives updates and has been ported to multiple platforms, with the most recent being in 2019 on the Nintendo Switch. The game is also available on Android devices and is one of the many games available on Google’s Apple Arcade competitor, Play Pass.
The cancellation of a Stadia port for Terraria comes at a challenging time for Google Stadia: last week, the company announced it was closing its in-house development studio and said it would rely instead solely on third-party developers. The cloud gaming service is also losing one of its biggest exclusives, Crayta, as its timed exclusivity deal is slated to end soon.
