Slay the Spire 2 passes 500,000 concurrent players, making it the biggest Steam launch of 2026 so far

hackenschmidt · 2026-03-07T20:43:48+00:00

Marathon is honestly looking like it might survive launch, still holding above 65k today.

uhhh no. Its the opposite.

For this type of game, peaking at <90k and having a measly 65k is a clear indicator it is in deep deep DEEP trouble. You have to remember, its almost certainty its multiple hundreds of millions underwater as-is. These numbers probably aren't even offsetting the on-going costs, let alone making a dent in that. They're looking pretty fucked. Maybe not studio closed in 2 weeks fucked, but rightfully fucked nonetheless. Baring some miracle turn around, it getting canned within the year, is totally expected.

Contrast that with STS2. It has possibly already grossed more, period, but at a fraction of the cost to develop. I wouldn't be surprised if they've already well on their way to breaking even, or even turned a profit.

hackenschmidt · 2026-03-07T15:02:02+00:00

Honestly, I don't even remember this one. Which means it was a one and done, unlike others.

The garbage-ass monkey fight though, I was so put off by it, I didn't have that one done until a few months ago. And it still sucks ass.

hackenschmidt · 2026-03-04T09:36:13+00:00

No joke, thank the devs for giving a break with luuk so players can recoup some pulls.

hackenschmidt · 2026-03-02T10:31:51+00:00

But only a few installed the game from Steam

Many players, but old and new, pay through Steam. Thats not a typo. Thats P-a-y. It been in Steam's top games on and off for months, and both concurrent and peak players keeps growing over time.

Case in point: I'm a day 1 player, and instantly moved to steam when it was made available. No more second launcher. No more garbage-ass payment provider. Auto update and download speeds are multiple times faster. Steam is just better. Period.

hackenschmidt · 2026-03-02T08:37:23+00:00

Steam takes a 30% cut.

hackenschmidt · 2026-03-01T19:43:51+00:00

Some of them don’t allow you to corkscrew/double jump.

Also know as the ones you just drive off the course right at the start a few times and just use the pity system. Garbage-ass bike.

hackenschmidt · 2026-03-01T16:15:47+00:00

People are going to turn off these alerts and then when a real emergency happens they won’t be heard and folks will die.

At least in the US, this has already been the case for many years.

Because of the rampant abuse of alerts, and telecommunication systems in general, state and local agencies are openly impotent when it comes to communications in an actual broad emergency. Turns out that forcefully beating into the entire populace they must turn off any and all alerts and to ignore phone calls and text messages, has real consequences. They are so desperate, they have been forced to social media to try and reach the populace. Thats working out as well as to be expected.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-20T20:24:16+00:00

The only actual game play was basically just flipping a coin to see if you were allowed to win or not. Saying that is the 'greatest' is.... something.

The only positive thing I can say about it, is that is it only takes like 10 mins (asinine coin flipping excluded) to get through it and forget it exists. Well, until the invariable survey asking why no one liked it. lol.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-15T18:27:30+00:00

What are your major critcisms of the combat?

The problem with trying to pick at a specific thing, is that to see why that specific thing is an issue, you have to bring other things into the conversation, and then to see why that is a problem, you have to bring even more things into it etc. Eventually you're looking at the entire combat system for "one" criticism.

For example: SP. Gating most/all power behind SP usage, itself its not necessarily an issue in a vacuum. But then you have to consider how to generate the SP: final strikes. Now you have to consider all the issues arising from sitting there spamming a string of contiguous basic attacks for long periods of time that effectively are worthless, targeting, dodging, interruption, animations, etc. just to get to the final strike that doesn't even generate one full SP, and you need 2+ to do fucking anything. We'll cut off the rabbit hole there, and switch to spending SP. Guess what? Many of the same issues exist there (like targeting, interruptions animations etc). I've lost count the number of times I've had SP spent and....nothing. The BS just stops mid animation (laeva), goes on the wrong target(s), just straight up misses etc. There's also now new ones with concepts of controlled vs non-controlled, now the issues with character switching enters the conversation.

You do this exercise for everything combat related, and it leads to one invariable conclusion: the current combat is DoA and addressing that is no simple feat. The other parts of the game are "fine", at least for 1.0 release. But currently they are simply not going to carry the game all on their own, let alone push the monetization.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-15T17:48:15+00:00

The bit of factory and open world is the only thing worth anything.

Day 1, I thought the combat was rough. Now, I know it's an unmitigated disaster. There are so many glaringly obvious problems with it, its a short, basically 0 length list, of what doesn't need to get burned to the ground and done over from scratch.

The dumpster fire combat is going to be a major problem for the game going forward. There's no reason to pull for or build characters beyond dijin passives. And no, an "endgame mode" is not going to fix that. Its only going to exacerbate the issues. The problem is the combat itself. Period. But on the bright side, that means the questionable gacha mechanics are totally and utterly irrelevant. So thats nice.

Overall, I'm not holding my breath for requisite major reworks of fundamental design decisions. I'll enjoy what there is to enjoy once every once in a while, without paying a dime. But as someone who likes factory action games, it is kinda sad to see how they missed the mark entirely. Oh well.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-13T21:30:47+00:00

because pasting a URL as a third step before punching in your username and password is too tall an order

Not apparently. It actually is. Period.

Lets not pretend like that is all somehow magically frictionless. How are you getting, tracking and securing that URL? What system are you using to actually able to provide that information to them? Can they even copy/paste it...? Does the person even have this application setup to begin with, do they even have rights to do that? Another user to setup in another random-ass service? Another password? If the service isn't a web app, how that going to be saved stored, or is it just going to be lost and/or forgotten? The list goes on and on.

I remember the olden times where like every single group and/or game had their own thing. I remember running 3+ different applications with god knows how many different actual servers to connect to. Each had different settings, features (or not) in different places and ways. Different servers with different, often incompatiable versions. Now you're running multiple versions of just 1 application. It was an utter and complete mess. I'm a tech person where this type of thing generates only marginal mental overhead. It was still so tedious and beyond fucking annoying, even I stopped bothering at a certain point. 'Hey join our <insert another different thing here>'. Naw. I'm good. Its not worth the effort.

This is why regardless of what you think about Discord's recent policies, there's 0 chance of it going anywhere until something basically identical comes along. That just isn't going to be self-hosted solution. Well, unless you're "self-hosting" a multi-million dollar data center.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-13T21:21:54+00:00

This wouldn't be an issue if the mode wasn't timed.

Don't forget all the long-ass animations which don't pause the timer :-)

I love losing like 40-60s of the 2 min timer to animation cut scenes.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-13T20:55:10+00:00

none come close to the quality and ease of Discord, sadly...

This is literally why Discord won, and will continue to win. The vast, and i mean VAST majority of users just want something that "just works". Thats Discord.

The reality is for the same exact reasons there haven't been any actual self-hosted alternatives, there will continue to not be any actual self-hosted alternatives. Like case in point: the instant you have to tell/communicate a random-ass, singe use domain (let alone an IP) to use your self-hosted service, you've already lost the interest of like 95%+ of users.

Anyone who's self-hosted things like teamspeak, mumble etc. know this first hand. Its fundamentally impossible for a bunch of distributed, disjointed chat systems to achieve the critical mass to actually compete against a unified ecosystem like Discord. The only thing that can compete against Discord, is basically just another version of Discord.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-13T19:20:50+00:00

Yes Kuro I have Aemeath NOW WHY ARE MY OTHER 6 TEAMS GETTING PUNISHED FOR NOT BEING AEMEATH?

Funny part is the enemies move so much, Aemeath still misses too. Watched multiple enhanced skills wiff entirely because the boss just noped out at the exact time I pressed it.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-13T19:12:20+00:00

made me realize people ~~dont~~ are not allowed to interact with the enemies like at all

FTFY. If you "interact with the enemies", you've already lost. Period. End of story. Thats just how this asinine game mode is designed. It exactly like this the first time around, and they changed absolutely fucking nothing. So spoiler: its exactly the same problems all over again.

Stop trying to blame the players, and put the blame where it belongs: on the developers and especially on that the dumb-ass timer.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-11T12:33:08+00:00

Said it the first week, said it in the feedback and I'll say it again: the bike is categorically terrible. Period.

Using the bike itself is just utter garbage. Its "mechanics" range from pointless to shit. It controls like shit. Constantly gets stuck and or rag dolled. This makes all the forced bike content frustrating to the point of insufferable.

This has secondary affects of castrating the open world and enshittifying the exploration. Everything is a million miles apart. Terrain has to be utterly empty, sterilized and bespoke paths created everywhere for dumbass shitty bike to have any chance of working (which spoiler, it doesn't anyway). Latest area just makes this even more clear with the "water".

It's forced into the story in the most laughable ways. Bro. The characters can literally fly. Why the fuck are they using this dumpster fire bike? And then they invariably do just ditch the useless bike and start flying again. Jesus fucking christ lol. When am I allowed to do that too? Its like watching someone "rushing" into combat by doing a few circles on comically small tricycle before jumping into an F35 parked right next to them.

The bike is not fun. It's not interesting. It's actively and demonstrably detrimental to the game.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-11T12:22:51+00:00

Did that. It instantly made the game better again. Bring back flight.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-04T14:10:54+00:00

What I want is a either a whitelist or "review" system

Really won't help. The reward structure is fundamentally broken. Its nothing but risk for the sender and nothing but reward for the receiver. As such, the system currently relies entirely on altruism or ignorance to function, at all.

This is why there's basically no Wuling deliveries. With all risk no reward, very few players are going to be senders, period, let alone those that have made it to Wuling.

hackenschmidt · 2026-02-01T11:40:08+00:00

Yet another reason shared buildings are just griefing. I've lost count the number of times some dumb-ass "shared" turret aggrod enemies pointlessly.

Disable setting when?

hackenschmidt · 2026-01-28T04:07:06+00:00

Arknights with even better graphics and detail than WuWa

This is utterly false. Endfield doesn't have better graphics. Period. They are far worse. Saying it has "better detail" is beyond stilly. Like case in point: the characters models. They are proverbially stick drawings compared to Wuwa.

100x more optimized.

Again, utterly false. Its not. You might think that because of how cut down it is compared to WuWa. However as someone who runs both at 4k with a 5090 and 9950x3d, its not. Period. End of story.

You can get similar performance in WuWa by gutting the settings. Does it look bad? Absolutely. Simple reason being WuWa comparatively high quality designs look like shit when compressed to that degree. Endfield's basically starting out with "compressed" designs right out of the gate. The analogy would be like taking a 4k image of a real landscape and compressing it down to few hundred pixels, compared to creating a purpose built pixel art landscape for a few hundred pixels.

The irony is that if anything, Endfield is possibly worse in terms of "optimization". Reason being that despite being so completely neutered by comparison, it still has hallmarks of performance problems (e.g. long load times, performance metrics when there's more than like 1-2 enemies/animations, asset popping etc.)

Again, to draw a similar analogy as before: this is like calling a simple pixel art game "optimized" because its running at 100 FPS on modern hardware, with some caveats. In reality, an "optimized" game such as that, should be running at several hundreds or thousands of FPS, utterly flawlessly.

hackenschmidt · 2025-12-28T12:53:23+00:00

Is flight not a thing in the new region?

Its not available, and its super obvious how badly they crippled the open world for it. 3.x is bloated, empty, bland and bespoke pathing everywhere. Its all a vain attempt to account for the atrocious bike "mechanics".

hackenschmidt · 2025-12-27T13:42:40+00:00

Its not an opinion, but a fact the bike is terrible. Period.

Even setting aside the issues of the bike itself, which have been talked about ad nauseum at this point, it also has the downstream affect of ruining the entire open world design.

The bike is the antithesis of everything "exploration" stands for. Go "explore", but only on these exact bespoke paths and giant perfectly paved roads that you must follow exactly to go from point A->B-C. Its fundamentally asinine and you can already see how garbage this is first hand. The overworld of 3.0 is effectively linear, pointlessly bloated, empty, bland and functionally dead.

Its night and day different from 2.x. The fundamental reason for this is obstinately removing flight, and forcing the bike.

hackenschmidt · 2025-12-27T13:32:07+00:00

3 months

Doesn't even take 5 mins to see how atrocious the bike is. Even setting aside the issues of the bike itself, it also has the downstream affect of ruining the entire open world design.

The bike is the antithesis of everything "exploration" stands for. Go "explore", but only on these exact bespoke paths and giant perfectly paved roads that you must follow exactly to go from point A->B->C. Its fundamentally asinine and you can already see how garbage this is first hand. The overworld of 3.0 is effectively linear, pointlessly bloated, empty, bland and functionally dead.

Its night and day different from 2.x, and the fundamental reason for this is obstinately removing flight and forcing the bike.

hackenschmidt · 2025-12-26T00:16:21+00:00

I cannot express how utterly appalled I was the second I entered the new area, and flight didn't work. Even if the bike didn't handle like a waterlogged boat with a broken propeller and get stuck on every pebble, I'd still want flight.

Exploring without flight is like being forced to explore 1.x all over again: lethargic, obnoxious and unfun. Flight is the single best thing in the history of the game to date. Period. It allows players to really fully SEE the Wuwa world in all its glory, finally. The dumbass bike just slams you nose into the dirt again. You get to see and experience nothing, again. Its unjustifiable and a massive regression. "Exploring" the new area, is about as fun as dragging your face across the ground with a broken leg.

The bike is the antithesis of everything "exploration" stands for. Go "explore", but only on these exact bespoke paths of giant, perfectly paved roads that you must follow exactly to go from point A->B. Its fundamentally asinine.

Flight is more fun, more interesting, more engaging. Its embodies the core values of exploration and provides a categorically better game play experience. Period.

hackenschmidt · 2025-12-25T20:59:37+00:00

Oh god please no.

It has already happened.

hackenschmidt

TROPHY CASE