In the off chance you haven’t heard, Google locked Terraria developer Andrew Spinks out of his Google account under mysterious circumstances, and in the ensuing fallout, he eventually cancelled Terraria’s upcoming Stadia release. While there’s room to argue that it sort of doesn’t matter what happens to Stadia games between now and when they pull the final plug soon, his thread on Twitter did kick off a widespread discussion about Google’s lazy bans and the countless creators impacted by a pattern of complacency already going back more than a decade.
I sincerely expected this article to be one more quiet trip down Grudge Lane. Instead, someone’s quick repost to Hacker News led to my site crashing (twice, actually), an eventual need to move to dedicated space with my hosting provider, and later the post got picked up on Engadget, Yahoo! Entertainment, and a variety of aggregator sites. Additional comments will appear in a piece at The National by Rhodri Marsden at some point in the near future.