Slay the Spire 2 devs were caught off guard by 13,000 negative Steam review spike: "It was much more extreme than any previous types of negative feedback"

Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano has been making games for a while, so when Slay the Spire 2 was abruptly rocked by over 13,000 contrasting negative Steam reviews within two days, he wasn't particularly shaken. But, he tells PC Gamer, some newer folks at the studio were a little more surprised.

"I think it depends on who in the studio," Yano says of the reaction. "Because I'm used to negativity and harsh feedback, and I'm pretty immune to it. But some of our other folks on the team, they weren't with us with the first game. And I think it was much more extreme than any previous types of negative feedback."

On March 20 and March 21, Steam users, and especially Chinese users, bombarded Slay the Spire 2 with negative reviews, largely criticizing a beta patch that took aim at infinite loop strategies. For instance, The Silent's beloved card Prepared was swapped from a draw-then-discard engine to a discard cost for delayed mana gain, making the class's cycle play style significantly more difficult to get online.

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This wasn't the only change in the patch, but players revolted against a perceived nerf to how fun the game is, because playing lots of cards in one turn is just fun. Mega Crit ultimately walked back the Prepared nerf, and developer Anthony, tacitly responding to the negative reviews, said in a Steam post that, "nothing in the beta branch is set in stone, expect lots of back and forth, and above all please let me know what you think by using the in-game feedback tool by hitting F2!"

Yano also touches on forms of feedback and why Chinese players with more limited online communication channels may turn to Steam reviews more readily. "I think it's difficult for players to feel like they're heard," he says. "So I understand why they choose to use Steam, doing something that would obviously impact things like visibility in the store and things like that to try to portray the feedback. I don't really get mad at players for doing bandwagoning stuff.

"I think it's really easy to, if you're a player in America, to be like, 'Why don't they just use these systems?' I don't really feel that way at all. I feel like it's kind of unfortunate that they feel that the only way to be heard is through Steam reviews. And so we were like, how can we improve a communication channel between the developers and players in China who have a very restricted communication channel compared to the other players? And so we're trying to solve that kind of issue more than just, like, name-calling – that would be the worst possible thing."

Yano acknowledges that players in China are "in a different place" in many ways, and says "we're all just people," so this wave of negative reviews won't go down as some black mark on Slay the Spire 2 or its community's record, even if some newer folks at Mega Crit may have raised their eyebrows, widened their eyes, and blinked very slowly over the news.

"We have the same feedback from the players in the US," he says. Yano doesn't pin it on Steam's review system either, which he says is "relatively good" even if it can lack nuance given its binary yes/no format.

There's been fair debate over whether this counted as a review bomb at all, as the player response was explicitly about a balance change made to the game, not the sort of external or corporate factor that often incites textbook review bombs. For example, last year Borderlands fans blasted the whole series on Steam over a higher-level TOS decision from Gearbox parent company Take-Two which some interpreted as an invasion of privacy. This Slay the Spire 2 patch was a very different situation, but it was far outside the norm of the game's otherwise glowing reviews. But where, say, Overwatch will likely never recover from its negative Steam reviews, Slay the Spire 2 is still shining in "very positive" light.

Slay the Spire 2 early access review: "Instantly familiar, but already bursting with new ideas."