Pirates Cracked Slay the Spire 2 at Launch — Mega Crit: 'We Don't Care'

Pirates cracked Slay the Spire 2 almost immediately after launch. The studio's response became the bigger story: a shrug.

The sequel had been a piracy conversation starter even before release, for two reasons. First, Mega Crit's own background — the original game's launch-era stance on piracy was famously relaxed, with the team viewing pirates as non-customers rather than lost revenue. Second, the engine switch to open-source Godot, which industry observers noted made reverse-engineering — and therefore cracking — structurally easier than with a locked proprietary engine.

The team's posture, restated in launch-week interviews: DRM arms races cost money and punish paying customers with friction, while pirates were never going to pay anyway. The engineering hours that other studios spend on anti-tamper went into the game instead — a trade the three-million-copy launch week suggested was, commercially at least, correct.

Programmer Jake Card later put the exclamation point on it in a Reddit discussion about Godot's moddability: the openness was a feature, and worrying about pirates was not on the roadmap. ("We don't care" was the polite summary.)

The episode joined the sequel's growing list of anti-industry-industry takes — no microtransactions, ever — and quietly became a reference point in the DRM debate: a top-selling Steam launch, cracked on arrival, that lost absolutely nothing measurable.

Keep reading:

• Why the Godot Switch Mattered
• No Microtransactions Pledge