When Slay the Spire 2 Accidentally Dunked on Bungie’s Marathon
Mega Crit tried to play the "small indie underdog" card against Bungie’s massive AAA shooter. The Steam charts had other plans.
There is a golden rule in comedy: always punch up. You never want to punch down. But what happens when you throw a playful jab at a massive, multi-million dollar target, only to suddenly realize you are actually the biggest guy in the room?
That is exactly the awkward, hilarious, and genuinely mind-blowing situation the developers at Mega Crit found themselves in this week. The launch of Slay the Spire 2 didn’t just meet expectations; it completely shattered them, and in the process, accidentally turned a lighthearted joke into a brutal dunk on Bungie’s highly anticipated extraction shooter, Marathon.
The Setup: A Classic Underdog Joke
It all started on Thursday. In the gaming industry, it is a pretty common courtesy for studios to congratulate each other when big games launch on the same day. With Slay the Spire 2 dropping into Steam Early Access right alongside Bungie’s massive sci-fi reboot of Marathon (and Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem), the Mega Crit team decided to have a little fun with the classic “David vs. Goliath” narrative.
Taking to X last Thursday, the official Mega Crit account posted: “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 was a classic bait-and-switch joke. The punchline relied on the obvious assumption that Bungie—a legendary AAA studio backed by Sony money, releasing a gorgeous live-service shooter—was going to absolutely dominate the Steam charts, leaving the little indie deckbuilder in its shadow. The joke only works if Marathon is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the week.
The Reality Check: 566,000 Concurrent Players
Except, that isn’t what happened. Not even close.
Within hours of the tweet going live, the Steam player counts started rolling in, and the industry collectively dropped its jaw. Marathon, despite its massive marketing budget and server slam weekends, was hovering around a respectable but modest 47,000 concurrent players.
Slay the Spire 2, on the other hand? It was sitting at a face-melting 566,000 concurrent players.
To put that into perspective, the indie card game was instantly the fourth most-played game on the entire Steam platform. It had over 300,000 more players than Apex Legends. It was completely eclipsing Marathon by a factor of ten. Suddenly, the “small indie passion project” tweet didn’t read like a self-deprecating joke from an underdog. It read like a heavyweight champion ruthlessly taunting an amateur.
“Meaner Than Intended”: The Sarcasm Backpedal
Realizing that the context of their joke had completely flipped, Mega Crit quickly jumped back online to do some damage control.
“It wasn’t supposed to be shade, we were being sarcastic,” the studio followed up, adding a crying emoji for good measure. “Did not know we’d blow up quite to the degree that we did.”
Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano chimed in shortly after, perfectly summarizing the sheer disbelief going on behind the scenes at the studio. “This seems a bit meaner than it was intended,” Yano admitted. “To be fair I didn’t think we’d actually pass Marathon in concurrent users.”
It is hard to blame them for not seeing this coming. Yes, the original Slay the Spire is universally beloved and essentially birthed the modern roguelike deckbuilder genre, but a half-million concurrent players is uncharted territory for almost any game, let alone an indie sequel in Early Access. In fact, just last year, Yano humbly compared Slay the Spire 2 to “unexciting chicken noodle soup.” He knew it was comforting and good, but he didn’t expect it to set the culinary world on fire. But as it turns out, people really, really love their chicken noodle soup.
When Chicken Noodle Soup Takes Over the World
The entire situation perfectly encapsulates the bizarre, unpredictable state of the gaming industry in 2026. You have Bungie, a studio with limitless resources, chasing the live-service extraction shooter trend with Marathon. Then you have Mega Crit, a small team that famously ditched the Unity engine in protest to rebuild their entire game in the open-source Godot engine, sticking to a premium, single-player (and co-op) model.
Bungie was supposed to be the Goliath in this scenario. Mega Crit was just trying to playfully throw a pebble. They just didn’t realize until after they threw it that the pebble was actually a meteorite.
It is highly unlikely that anyone at Bungie actually took offense to the joke, as developers generally understand the chaotic nature of launch days. But for the players watching from the sidelines, it provided the funniest, most unexpected storyline of the year. Slay the Spire 2 isn’t just the king of deckbuilders anymore; it is the king of Steam.
Check out our full breakdown of the Latest Gaming News to see what else is topping the charts this week.
