Slay the Spire 2: From 193 Players to Steam's Biggest Roguelike Ever
The original launched in 2017 to a crowd of 193. Its sequel drew 574,638 at once, sold 3 million copies in a week and is still in early access. Where Mega Crit's 'chicken noodle soup' stands eight months on.
In 2017, a little card game called Slay the Spire opened its doors on Steam to a peak of 193 concurrent players. Its makers at Mega Crit liked to describe it as the chicken noodle soup of video games: comforting, reliable, not exactly thrilling. Nine years later, the soup has become a feast.
Slay the Spire 2 entered Steam Early Access on March 5, 2026, and over its first weekend reached an all-time peak of 574,638 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. A week after launch Mega Crit said it had sold 3,000,000 copies and players had attempted more than 25 million runs. It is now the most-played roguelike in Steam's history, ahead of Elden Ring Nightreign.
A record that kept rising
The climb was almost comic. Mega Crit tweeted early on that concurrent players had hit 179,456, already a record for any roguelike. Two days later PC Gamer counted more than 430,000. By the end of the weekend the game was Steam's fourth most-played title, behind only PUBG: Battlegrounds, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, and the No. 1 global top seller, ahead of Resident Evil Requiem and Bungie's Marathon, which launched the same week.
Its final peak fell just 12,512 short of Hollow Knight: Silksong's 587,150, the biggest indie launch of 2025.
What's new in the sequel
The basic loop is the same and that is the point: pick a character, build a deck of cards as you climb, choose a path through a branching map, and try to beat the boss at the top before you die and start again. The sequel adds new characters and cards, new events and, for the first time, a co-op mode, with more to come.
Mega Crit's early access plans include alternate versions of acts two and three, a reworked scoring system, a friends-only leaderboard, a phobia accessibility mode, Steam Workshop support and Twitch integration. The studio also opened a public beta branch so players can test changes before they go live.
The review-bomb wobble
Not everything went smoothly. In spring, a run of balance patches upset part of the large Chinese player base, and Steam reviews dropped sharply. Speaking at the Digital Dragons conference in May, Tom Kaczmarczyk of analytics firm IndieBI said that in any other case you would call a game in that state dead, but that Slay the Spire 2's sales in China "did not fall that much." The game's player count stayed steady through the storm.
By the numbers
- March 5, 2026: early access launch.
- 574,638: all-time Steam peak.
- 3,000,000: copies sold in about a week.
- 25,000,000+: runs attempted in that first week.
- $24.99: early access price, which Mega Crit says will rise at 1.0.
- 193: the original game's launch-day peak in 2017.
What's next
Mega Crit has refused to set a strict schedule for leaving early access, saying it will stay there until the game "feels great" and adds a true ending and more modes. Console versions are expected after 1.0. If you've never played a deckbuilder, this is the best possible starting point, and if you have, there are now 25 million reasons to think you'll lose a weekend to it.
See how it compares to the rest of the year in our 2026 Steam hits round-up, or read about the open-source tech that runs it in our Linux and Proton explainer.