Slay the Spire 2 vs Marathon — Mega Crit Trolls, Then Apologizes

Launch day handed the internet a gift-wrapped rivalry: Slay the Spire 2 and Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon shipped the same day — a tiny indie card roguelike against a AAA live-service shooter — and the player-count comparison wrote itself into every timeline.

The numbers were lopsided fast. The spire's concurrency blew past 200,000 and kept climbing; Marathon's Steam numbers struggled to clear six figures, well below its playtest peaks. Social media did what social media does, and Mega Crit's own account leaned in — posting a tongue-in-cheek "congratulations to the Marathon team on the launch" flavored with a jab about being out-numbers-ed by a small indie passion project.

The internet received it exactly as badly as it read. What the team intended as locker-room banter landed as kicking a struggling peer on its launch day, and the blowback came fast — including from voices who noted that Marathon's team had its own bruising launch week without needing a second one.

Three days later, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano owned it: the congratulation post "read as far meaner than intended," he said — the team hadn't expected the player-count comparison to swing as hard as it did, and the joke had aged into something else entirely. The apology was accepted about as gracefully as internet apologies get, and the episode settled into launch-week lore: the day the card game out-drew the shooter, and the winner learned to gloat more carefully.

Keep reading:

• The Apology, Three Days Later
• Peak Passes 280,000