Slay the Spire 2 boom
Slay the Spire 2 has sold roughly 4.6 million copies and pulled in over $92 million in its first two weeks, making it one of Steam’s biggest indie launches (ixbt.games) (alineaanalytics.substack.com). Its first big balance patch (Thursday night) massively nerfed staple player strategies and buffed the final boss Doormaker, provoking over 9,000 negative Steam reviews in one day while devs insist changes are experimental and reversible — the update also ships multiplayer, new classes/cards and a Phobia Mode (gamesradar.com) (pcgamer.com).
Mega Crit’s March 13 “Neowsletter” confirmed Slay the Spire 2 sold 3,000,000 copies in its first week and reported players attempted more than 25,000,000 runs. (megacrit.com) The studio said that its run-count is an undercount because telemetry collection began after launch, meaning the true number of attempts is higher than reported. (megacrit.com) Steam concurrency peaked at roughly 574,000–575,000 players shortly after release, briefly placing Slay the Spire 2 among Steam’s most-played titles and ahead of Bungie’s Marathon in concurrent users. (fullcleared.com) Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano publicly apologized for a tongue-in-cheek social post about Marathon after the launch, calling the remark “a bit meaner than it was intended.” (mastersingaming.com) IGN and GameSpot both note the studio pushed a post-launch update to the game’s beta branch that included new art and VFX alongside the other changes being tested. (ign.com) Tracking outlets recorded a rapid drop in the game’s Steam review classification from around 97% “Overwhelmingly Positive” to about 83% “Very Positive” within roughly 24 hours. (kotaku.com) PC Gamer reported that a surge of negative reviews arrived before some changes were live and flagged that China’s restricted access to Steam can skew the timing and concentration of review activity. (pcgamer.com)
