Slay the Spire 2 Got Review-Bombed Three Times in Three Months. How Much Did It Actually Cost the Studio?

Slay the Spire 2 had the best Early Access launch in the history of Steam roguelikes: 3 million copies sold in its first week, more than 573,000 concurrent players at its peak, and 25 million runs started up the Spire. The original took nine years to sell its lifetime total of 3.6 million copies. And yet between March and May, the game went through three separate waves of mass negative reviews on Steam, each for a completely different reason, with its rating swinging from "Overwhelmingly Positive" to "Mostly Negative" and back.

The pressure of one of the decade's most anticipated sequels

The original Slay the Spire, from 2019, defined the entire roguelike deckbuilder genre, inspiring dozens of imitators over seven years before Mega Crit even announced a sequel. Slay the Spire 2's first week of Early Access, starting March 5, 2026, out-earned the launch weeks of both Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong on Steam, and it set a new concurrent-player record for the roguelite genre on day one. At that scale of expectation, any single design decision had a chance to trigger a disproportionately loud reaction, well before any dispute over the credits.

Wave one: balance

On March 19, Mega Crit announced its first big post-launch patch, focused partly on making "infinite" card combos harder to pull off. Within 24 hours, the game's rating dropped from 97% to 83% positive, with roughly 11,000 negative reviews landing on Steam. The reason was purely mechanical: some players didn't want to lose a playstyle they'd worked out for themselves.

Wave two: an update and Chinese-language players

On April 16-18, Mega Crit shipped "Major Update #1," rolling everything tested on the beta branch into the main game. The reaction from Chinese-speaking players was especially sharp: more than 8,000 negative reviews in Simplified Chinese landed within two days. At one point the 30-day rating dropped to 39% positive, which Steam classifies as "Mostly Negative." Mega Crit responded by asking for patience, explaining plainly that moving a change from beta to the main branch doesn't mean it's final, and ultimately removed a controversial Act 3 boss, Doormaker, replacing it with a different fight.

Wave three: a dispute over a credits listing

A third wave arrived in May, this time after players noticed a "Consultant" credit for Anita Sarkeesian, a critic and creator of an online video series about storytelling patterns in games, in Slay the Spire 2's credits. Some of the new negative reviews came from accounts that had bought the game within the previous 24 hours solely to leave a negative review and immediately request a refund. Mega Crit did not publicly comment on either the scope of Sarkeesian's involvement or the review wave itself, unlike the previous two waves, where the studio addressed the community directly.

The stakes are higher than usual

Mega Crit is playing for more than one bad wave of reviews here, because Slay the Spire 2 also doubles as a test of a business model that runs directly against the trend in big productions: no microtransactions, no seasonal pass, one price for the game, and regular free updates throughout Early Access. The record first-week sales showed that model can still win at scale, as long as the studio can hold onto player trust across the entire, multi-year Early Access cycle, not just through launch week.

What it actually cost the studio

All told, the game has racked up close to 80,000 negative reviews, roughly fourteen times what the original Slay the Spire received across nine years. Tom Kaczmarczyk, founder and CEO of the games analytics firm IndieBI, checked what actually happened to real sales during the Chinese-language wave: despite the sharp drop in rating, sales in the Chinese market didn't see a corresponding collapse. In other words, the Steam rating and buyers' actual behavior diverged sharply in this case.

Steam itself has a built-in mechanism for exactly this scenario. The game's store page currently states outright that "this product's review history has at least one period of off-topic review activity," and under the platform's default settings, reviews from those periods don't count toward the displayed overall rating. That doesn't erase the effect entirely, since the waves still show up in the historical data and in the raw count of negative reviews, but it explains why the game's rating at any given moment can look considerably better than the April or May headlines alone would suggest.