Yesterday, two major titles were released at the same time on Steam (and one of them also launched on PS5 and Xbox Series ). Bungie's new extraction shooter, Marathon , and indie developer MegaCrit's highly anticipated sequel to its beloved rougelike deckbuilder, Slay the Spire 2 .
When both games launched - - their launch numbers for concurrent player counts on Steam were actually hand in hand, with both games reaching 80K+ concurrent players. Marathon would continue to peak at
Slay the Spire 2, on the other hand, was just getting started. At the time of this writing, there are 420,395 players working towards slaying that spire for a second time . Now, in the case of Marathon, we can't know how many players are landing on Tau Ceti IV on PS5 or Xbox Series X/S. It's likely that it's total player numbers are actually above 100K. Maybe they're even on par with Slay the Spire 2, we can't actually know for sure.
But going with what we can know through the snapshot that SteamDB offers, it's pretty clear which game PC players were more excited to get into. It also makes a sarcastic joke that MegaCrit made at Marathon's expense even funnier than anyone could have imagined.
Shortly after both games launched on Steam, MegaCrit quoted Bungie's launch post, saying, " 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's a harmless jab that the studio admits in a separate post to be just that, saying that " " adding that the team did not know the game would blow up as much as it did. Of course, they couldn't have known that, but the fact that Slay the Spire 2 has continued to climb is both incredible to see for the actual indie team between the two games and makes their sarcastic jab all the more hilarious.
It looks even more impressive when you remember that Slay the Spire 2 is in early access, and by that mark is technically an unfinished game.
Now, it's worth noting that these are just launch numbers and that, once again, in Marathon's case, they don't offer the full picture. Steam concurrents are only really useful in small doses; they only offer so much information. But that doesn't make this snapshot any less impressive for MegaCrit.
Perhaps one day, Marathon will be as big as Slay the Spire 2. But not today.
Follow to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.