Andrew Spinks is the creator of Terraria and CEO of Re-Logic, and 13 years after the game's initial release he's come up with a new refund policy for the ludicrously cheap game. "Personally defeat" Terraria's creator in PvP, and you can have your money back. Oh, and "no questions asked."
Spinks, who goes by the handle Redigit, says players who want their $10 back now have this option:
"I’m pleased to announce that Re-Logic has a new refund policy. You can now refund Terraria for any reason, no questions asked," writes Spinks (first spotted by GamesRadar+). "You just have to personally defeat me in PVP."
I'm not sure that taking on someone who's both created and has been playing a game for multiple decades is an especially easy task, and sure enough popular Terraria YouTuber Chippy quickly proved this was the case. Shortly after Spinks' proposition, Chippy posted the below video lamenting that it's "harder than it sounds", with the clip showing Chippy getting absolutely beasted in a 1vs1 joust against Spinks.
It’s harder than it sounds https://t.co/lroAmnsVhn pic.twitter.com/4mCjSc6VRfJune 9, 2024
The stakes even seem to get higher. "We are jousting, and whoever wins the joust becomes the new CEO of Re-Logic," says Spinks at the beginning of the fight, before promptly winning the fight and retaining his position. There's no indication as to whether there's any penalty for the loser: I mean, I'm pretty bad at Terraria, but I reckon if I was able to just go at Spinks 100 times I could probably win one. Maybe.
Re-Logic head of business Ted Murphy told PC Gamer that it's become "somewhat of a tradition" for ChippyGaming to challenge Redigit for the title of CEO during testing sessions. "They have had joust-offs, challenges using only certain weapons, and the like. Chippy has never dethroned the king," he said.
Murphy explained that Spinks' tweets were the result of the team reading through some of Terraria's recent refund requests and Steam reviews. "We like to read both regularly just so that we can see what problems might be out there that players are facing. It is a great way to find gameplay elements that need tweaks, bugs to fix, etc." he said. "A lot of our negative reviews are 'fake' negative reviews and/or the reasons given are so wild and random (people with hundreds of hours just leaving rants about the Angler or Cave Bats, etc.) that the team was having a good laugh at a lot of them." The tongue-in-cheek tweets were the result of "those two lines of humor coming together."
It's honestly hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to refund Terraria at this point. It's been years and years since I last played but it's always been a terrific game, and one of those that the developer seems unable to leave behind, in a good way. In 2022 Spinks said Terraria's next big update would definitely, definitely be the last: but that's not how things played out, with the developer declaring 2023 "the year of Terraria crossplay", while various community members mooch about doing mind-blowing things like building a computer in the game then playing Pong on it.
"Why on earth would I ever want to refund Terraria," a player called Shadow asks Spinks, to which the response is simple:
"So you can buy Terraria again."
