How successful the sequel to the fan-favorite deck-building roguelike became surprised everyone, including the developers.
TL;DR
- Slay the Spire 2 dominated Steam charts immediately after launching in Early Access.
- The game reached over 570,000 concurrent players, placing it among Steam’s all-time most popular games.
- Developers at Mega Crit said they were surprised by the scale of the sequel’s success.
- The game currently holds overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.
- The sequel already feels like a complete experience despite being in Early Access.
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Unexpected Magnitude of Success for Slay the Spire 2 Early Access
Slay the Spire 2 absolutely dominated Steam charts on release and continues to sit at the top days later. The Early Access tag didn’t scare people off; they rushed in the moment the game became available.
The game developers, Mega Crit, certainly expected the game to become the center of attention, but they didn’t expect the sheer scale of what was about to happen. Quoting developers, they were totally blown away.
Not only did the game top some of the charts on Steam, but it also received overwhelmingly positive reviews. If you’ve never tried to make a game, you can only imagine how difficult it is to please that many players without upsetting other parts of the community.
Slay the Spire 2 absolutely exploded, proving once more that indie games can be a better bang for your buck compared to some of the recent overpriced AAA games. Seriously, this much fun for $25 feels like a steal in the current climate.
Concurrent Players on Steam – Top 20 Games of All Time
To give you a better understanding of what happened and why it’s such a big deal, we’ll bring up some numbers from SteamDB.
Hollow Knight: Silksong was on everyone’s lips for a period of time, and not without a reason – but let’s save the discussion about how good Silksong is for another time. That game has an all-time peak of 587,150 concurrent players on the Steam platform.
Now, compare this to the Early Access of Slay the Spire 2, which managed to get all the way up to 574,638. It’s almost there.
What’s also surprising is that the original Slay the Spire peaked at around 50,000 – you can clearly see how huge the gap is between the two games. It explains why developers were positively shocked by the sequel’s success.
It’s difficult to say whether the freshly released fantasy deck-builder will be able to beat Hollow Knight, but it doesn’t matter; getting that high is already an impressive feat and deserves all respect. In fact, it’s enough to put the game in the top 20 most popular games on Steam ever made.
And there are cherries on top; Slay the Spire 2 has a slightly better review score on Steam – 94.46% versus Silksong’s 88.26% at the time of writing. It’s also ranked #1 in the most wishlisted games recently.
Is Early Access Worth Trying?
Despite being an Early Access game, Slay the Spire 2 already feels like a full and complete product that will only get better with time. It feels like the original game but bigger and better in almost every aspect, with new game mechanics, new cards, powerful combos to discover, and also some returning characters.
If you’d like to give it a try now, you won’t be disappointed. There’s more than enough high-quality content to keep you busy for hours to come.
In other words, you wouldn’t notice the difference if Slay the Spire 2 were released as a version 1.0 with an announcement that additional post-launch updates would follow.
Slay the Spire 2 – Full Game Release Date
Slay the Spire 2 has no release date or a specific timeline for the full version of the game yet. The game will remain in the Early Access state for the foreseeable future, and Mega Crit will use that time to add more content, polish and balance what’s already there, and gather feedback from the community to make the sequel a worthy successor to the original title.
It already is.