Mega Crit co-founder and developer behind hit indie release Slay the Spire 2 Casey Yano has admitted a congratulations post to the Marathon development team “seems a bit meaner than it was intended”, as they never thought Slay the Spire 2 would pass Bungie’s new extraction shooter in Steam concurrent users.
Both Slay the Spire 2 and Marathon launched on Steam at the same time, leading to an unavoidable bit of friendly competition between the two releases. In a bit of tongue-in-cheek support, the Mega Crit X account posted: “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”
It turns out the power of small indie projects is nothing to sneeze at. During the launch day for both games, Marathon brought in a respectable peak of 88,337 concurrent players. Meanwhile, Slay the Spire 2 dropped an absurd 430,456 concurrent players. It is obviously worth noting that Slay the Spire 2 is only launching on PC, while Marathon has both the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S audience to appeal to, but nonetheless it’s a funny side-by-side.
With this context in mind, Yano shared their thoughts on the friendly jab on their personal social media account: “This seems a bit meaner than it was intended…. To be fair I didn’t think we’d actually pass Marathon in concurrent users”.
It is a stunning success story for Mega Crit and Slay the Spire. The original game is a fantastic experience that won over a die-hard crowd of fans and enthusiasts over the years, which appears to have generated enough word of mouth to result in an absolutely scorcher of a release in an already packed month of big launches. It remains enormously tough out there for developers these days – but when they hit, indies in particular do seem to keep hitting incredibly hard.