A few days ago, I mentioned the indie game Terraria and recently got it myself. An excellent and fun game with a large amount of content and some really good gameplay, best called a fusion of Minecraft and Spelunkey. As is common in games with open worlds and breakable environments, it sold extremely well among gamers, and raked the developer in a very nice sum of cash.
Yesterday, Terraria sold a whopping 200,000 copies, an extremely high amount for something that just popped up out of nowhere, and advertized almost completely by word of mouth and some Lets Play videos scattered around the internet. The freeform 2D mechanics of the game allowing for mining, grappling hooks, and explosives makes for a very interesting game in PvE and PVP aspects.
The game was made by a very small team in a very small frame of time, but it struck gold among the users on Steam, reaching a high amount of sales, getting a modding community, and I’m sure that in just these few days there’s already a very comprehensive wiki detailing the finer points of the game found through EXE hacking and trial-and-error. A truly amazing title that will set a standard for open-ended games where you can quite literally do whatever you like. Game developers should take note of these kinds of games and see what they themselves can come up with.
