Slay the Spire 2 dev says its Marathon joke turned out 'a bit meaner than expected' in hindsight: 'To be fair I didn't think we'd actually pass Marathon in concurrent users'

Comedy tends to land better when you punch up rather than punch down—but what about when, as you begin to wind up your punch, you go from a highly anticipated indie to the #1 best selling game on Steam, bypassing the likes of Resident Evil Requiem and Marathon? Mega Crit, developers of Slay the Spire 2, found out exactly what that's like this week.

If you missed it, the studio put out a post on X last Thursday that reads, "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." Cheeky, but a follow-up from the same day clarifies "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."

Another follow-up from Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano was posted later. Yano said, "This seems a bit meaner than it was intended… To be fair I didn't think we'd actually pass Marathon in concurrent users."

At least on Steam, Slay the Spire is comfortably ahead of Marathon. As I write this, Marathon has around 47,000 concurrent players according to SteamDB while Slay the Spire 2 has a facemelting 566,000, making it the fourth most played game on the entire platform right now. One population is healthy, but the other is showstopping; Spire has over 300,000 more people playing it than Apex Legends.

I think in either case, the joke is little more than gentle ribbing, but Slay the Spire 2's huge success does alter the context. It seems like Mega Crit genuinely didn't anticipate such a big launch: Yano compared the game to unexciting chicken noodle soup last year, but that's the thing about soup—it's as delicious and popular these days as I assume it was in ancient times and any moment between then and now. It's got its own specialized spoon, for God's sake!