Comfortably one of the biggest hits of the year so far, Slay the Spire 2 launched to a massive spike of over 573,000 concurrent players on Steam. Though the community's remained steady, reviews on Steam have nose-dived in a way that's surprised developer Mega Crit, but one analyst doesn't think such things ultimately moved the needle in terms of sales.
During a talk at Digital Dragons attended by GamesRadar+, Tom Kaczmarczyk, the founder and CEO of games analysis firm IndieBI, discussed the importance of player scores on Valve's store. "The social proof of having a game which is mostly positive instead of overwhelmingly positive, but has 1,000 reviews instead of 600, I think the 1,000 is gonna perform better," he begins.
"We've seen the extreme cases of review bombing for good reasons, like Slay the Spire 2, and the impact on actual sales," Kaczmarcyk argues. "Slay the Spire 2 had issues where the community in China, huge player base, they didn't like some of the updates on the changes, and they roasted [it]."
It's true much of the negativity came on the back of the game's updates and patches. Being a roguelike deckbuilder in early access, Slay the Spire 2 is a constant work-in-progress as the devs make alterations, rebalance cards and features, and then add more as time goes on. Some of these will go down better than others. Players in China, where leaving reactive reviews like this is a more popular (and, due to online restrictions, arguably necessary) approach, were just especially against some changes.
But Kaczmarcyk believes the game will simply endure, even though this sort of review dive may have been a death knell for other releases: "The review score dropped to the floor, to a point where in any other case you would say this game is dead, it's unplayable. Clearly, nobody likes it."
Even "sales in China did not fall that much," he concludes.
Since the first game had a healthy lifespan of several years, I'd err on the side of enjoying the game, early access foibles and Steam reviews aside. It's the successor to the king of deckbuilders, and it's commanding the throne so far. And for a game like this, the tide is always just one nerf, buff, or new class away from turning.
