While Bungie’s Marathon and the Game Freak-developed Pokémon Pokopia dominated headlines following their Thursday releases, one highly anticipated indie sequel is poised to outperform both. Slay the Spire 2, indie developer-publisher MegaCrit’s follow-up to 2019 roguelike deckbuilder Slay the Spire, launched in Early Access on Thursday. One day later, and playership continues to climb.
The indie roguelike launched with nearly 200,000 concurrent users on Thursday, and studio MegaCrit shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) celebrating the impressive new stats. “Slay the Spire 2’s concurrent Steam players just hit 179,456, the highest ever for any roguelike. When StS1 first launched back in 2017, it had 193 concurrent players. That’s a 92,982% increase, meaning StS3 is on track to hit 166,861,777 concurrent players by 2035.”
Slay the Spire 2‘s success certainly hasn’t slowed since the studio’s post. At the time of writing, the indie hit’s active player count has since surpassed 400,000 (per SteamDB). Concurrent player counts peaked around 9 a.m. EST with more than 430,000 users ascending the titular spire.
Just one day in, and Slay the Spire 2 continues to shatter genre records. The roguelike deckbuilder — currently Steam’s no. 1 top seller — has now beaten past player count peaks set by mega-hits Hades 2 and Mewgenics.
Slay the Spire 2 is currently ranked no. 34 in Steam’s daily active user (DAU) counts and no. 2 in wishlist activity. Capcom’s survival-horror blockbuster, Resident Evil Requiem, remains the medium’s most-wanted title. Slay the Spire 2 has nearly 5,000 English-language reviews on the platform, with positive reviews accounting for about 97%.
‘Slay the Spire 2’ studio MegaCrit makes jab at ‘Marathon’
As Marathon, Pokémon Pokopia, and Slay the Spire 2 prepare to dominate many gamers’ weekend plans, the latter is poking fun at its comparatively controversial launch-day counterpart. In a new post on X, MegaCrit congratulated Bungie on its Marathon launch:
“Congratulations to the Marathon team on their launch!
“Don’t let small indie passion projects like this pass you by just because Slay the Spire 2 is out.”
The studio later took to social media to clarify that the post was made in jest. “it wasn’t supposed to be shade, we were being sarcastic 😭 did not know we’d blow up quite to the degree that we did…”
While creatives at indie label MegaCrit continue to celebrate the sequel’s success, Bungie is urging critics and publications to hold off on Marathon reviews until the studio addresses suboptimal player counts.
Show the spire who’s boss in MegaCrit’s long-awaited roguelike deckbuilder sequel, Slay the Spire 2, available on PC via Steam today.
