Slay the Spire II's early access success bodes well for the game's future.
March 2026 is a month that keeps giving to players, with plenty of highly-anticipated and highly-rated game launches peppered over most of the upcoming weekends.
In the first week after Resident Evil Requiem’s release, however, the biggest launch was not an AAA title, but an indie game. Mega Crit’s highly anticipated Slay the Spire II, which launched in Early Access, continued to smash records during its first weekend, peaking at 574,638 concurrent players according to SteamDB.
This places it as the fourth most-played game on Steam at the time of writing, behind massive multiplayer hits like PUBG: Battlegrounds, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2. It also enters the top 20 games with the highest concurrent player counts of all time on the platform.
Interestingly, the record is also a little over 12,000 players short of surpassing the peak set by 2025 indie favourite Hollow Knight: Silksong, which reached an all-time high of 587,150 concurrent players. Slay the Spire II also maintained its position over the weekend as Steam’s No. 1 global top seller, beating other major March releases such as Resident Evil Requiem and Marathon, which sit in third and fourth place respectively, behind Counter-Strike 2.
Even with the success and support pouring in over the weekend, the dev team continued to work hard, releasing two hot fixes over the weekend.
Mega Crit jokingly congratulates the Marathon team
Mega Crit’s team also wasted no time cracking jokes at the expense of one AAA studio, although they later clarified that they were not “throwing shade”.
On 6 March, the Mega Crit team congratulated Bungie for Marathon’s launch on X (formerly Twitter):
“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 ❤️,” they wrote in a repost of Marathon’s own congratulatory message.
The post immediately set the gaming side of X alight, with users such as @TonyZolezi calling it “a shade for the centuries”, while others said that the indie game in effect “mogged a US$200 million project mercilessly.”
Mega Crit quickly clarified by replying to the post, saying that “it wasn’t supposed to be shade” and adding that they “didn’t expect that we would blow up quite to the degree that we did”.
Despite Megacrit's unintentional shade, Marathon continues to be Steam's fourth top seller over the weekend, next to Resident Evil Requiem.
Another big win for indie roguelites
Slay the Spire II’s success follows that of another indie roguelite, Mewgenics, which sold more than one million copies in its first week. This follows the success of many indie games in 2025, with over 10 indie games reaching more than 100,000 players, and some titles like Hollow Knight: Silksong, Blue Prince, and Hades II gaining accolades in 2025.
Early Access for Slay the Spire II is currently available on PC via Steam, with console versions expected to follow once the game reaches a full release.
