Some might have thought Bungie’s Marathon was going to be the big launch on Steam this week, but it turns out Slay the Spire 2 has quadrupled Bungie’s extraction shooter in terms of concurrent player numbers on Valve’s PC gaming platform.
Casey Yano, game developer and co-founder of Slay the Spire maker MegaCrit, took to social media to say he never thought Slay the Spire 2 would pass Marathon in terms of concurrent users. Well, it certainly has. At the time of this article’s publication, Slay the Spire 2 has over 350,000 concurrent players on Valve’s platform — an incredible number that makes it one of the most-played games on Steam, behind only the eternally popular PUBG, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2.
Marathon, meanwhile, hit a peak concurrent player count of 88,337 on the day of launch, a number Bungie will be hoping improves as the game heads into its first weekend.
Why did Yano mention this on social media in the first place? It was as part of an acknowledgement that a tweet from the official MegaCrit account about the launch of Marathon — viewed over half a million times — came off a little meaner than intended.
“Congratulations to the Marathon team on their launch!” MegaCrit tweeted Thursday, March 5. “Don’t let small indie passion projects like this pass you by just because Slay the Spire 2 is out.”
Some thought that was throwing shade at Marathon, which is under significant pressure to deliver for Bungie following the torrid time the Sony-owned studio has faced in recent years. So, both the MegaCrit account and Yano himself issued follow-up messages.
“This seems a bit meaner than it was intended,” Yano said. “To be fair I didn’t think we’d actually pass Marathon in concurrent users.”
And, in response to one user who called it “A SHADE FOR THE CENTURIES,” MegaCrit said: “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…” All’s well that ends well. Bungie community manager Cozmo then replied to offer a congratulations of his own.
Slay the Spire 2 isn’t just outpacing Marathon on Steam, it’s rewriting the roguelike record books. It’s shot past Mewgenics to secure the highest ever concurrent player count on Steam for a roguelike, which itself inched ahead of Hades 2 last month.
That’s an astonishing and clearly unexpected debut for this long-awaited sequel to the popular deckbuilder roguelike Slay the Spire, which returned a 9/10 review back in 2019. We said: “Slay the Spire takes some of the best parts of deckbuilding games, roguelikes, and dungeon crawlers, and mixes them into a wholly new and extremely satisfying package.”
Slay the Spire 2 is currently only available on PC for its early access period, but it seems likely to get console versions once it’s fully released.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
