Slay the Spire 2 Devs Apologize for the Marathon Joke — 'Meaner Than Intended'
Published 2026-03-09Updated 2026-09-193 min read
Mega Crit's Casey Yano apologized for the launch-day jab at Marathon's team, admitting the congratulations post read 'far meaner than intended' after the player-count gap became a meme.

Three days after launch-day gloating backfired, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano publicly apologized for the studio's Marathon quip — conceding that the celebratory post had come across, in his words, "far meaner than intended."
The sequence: Slay the Spire 2 and Bungie's Marathon launched the same day, the Steam player-count gap between a $30 card roguelike and the AAA shooter became an instant meme, and Mega Crit's account joined in with a sarcastic congratulations to the Marathon team — the kind of victory-lap post that plays great to your own fanbase and terribly to everyone else, including, it turned out, a Marathon dev team having a genuinely rough launch week.
Yano's admission covered both halves of the miss. The team hadn't anticipated the comparison swinging so decisively — the scale of the player-count gap surprised even them — and rereading the post once it had, he acknowledged it read as punching down at colleagues on their own launch day rather than celebrating alongside them.
The apology was the rare kind that lands: specific, unqualified, and delivered by the person whose name was on the joke. The community moved on quickly — there was a record-breaking launch to cover, after all — but the episode stuck as the launch's one wobble, and a small masterclass in the difference between confidence and crowing.
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