‘We’re microtransaction haters’: Slay the Spire 2 devs explain approach to early access, confirm easier modding and win streak tracker

Slay the Spire 2 developers at Mega Crit doubled down on their stance against aggressive monetization in their games. “We’re microtransaction haters,” Casey Yano, STS developer and co-founder of Mega Crit, told Destructoid, adding that, still, “a lot of our players threaten to buy all and any cosmetics we may ever release.”

Yano explained that Mega Crit’s focus for Slay the Spire 2 remains the same as in the original title. “We really want players to experience all of the same content as discussion of game content and balance is sort of our lifeblood.” When I asked him if the new game’s balance would be as good as in Slay the Spire, he playfully replied, “Is STS1 really that balanced though? Either way, we work towards balance all the time. Considerably more so than the first game as we’re more familiar with our tools (which have been improved too).”

You’ll be able to mod Slay the Spire 2, too

Mods are an important, albeit optional, part of the Slay the Spire experience on PC, with fan-made content like the Downfall mod with bosses as playable characters becoming an official expansion of the STS board game. Casey has confirmed player content will be even more prominent in the sequel.

“Both in STS 1 and STS 2, you can replace entire swathes of code, so you can kind of do anything,” he said. “A lot of our focus this time around is reducing friction, so players have more resources and easier entry points to work with mods.” It’s unclear if Slay the Spire 2 will get a mod tool, though.

Still, that doesn’t mean Mega Crit will relegate early access content updates to modders, despite this early version on Slay the Spire 2 “missing so much content,” as Yano said. “At the moment, I’m not entirely sure what we’ll update often throughout early access. Hopefully pure content. The good stuff.”

Yano adds that he can’t make any promises about how Slay the Spire 2 will be updated, as his team works on it reactively. “If we update too often or make too many aggressive balance changes, progress and accomplishments may feel less impactful,” he explained.

Slay the Spire nerds, rejoice

If you have countless hours of gameplay in the original Slay the Spire, maybe even over 1,000 hours as I do, Mega Crit’s adding features to STS 2 you’ll likely want to use, such as a win streak tracker.

“I think we track streaks in STS 2 on a per-character basis so you can be a bit more competitive—against your past even,” Yano said after I asked him about the potential for a competitive feature in Slay the Spire 2, aside from Daily Runs. “But these kinds of things can be spoofed pretty easily. We don’t have plans for an involved anti-cheat as it’s invasive. At some level, it’ll have to be merit-based, but we’re launching in early access, so maybe new methods and technologies may come about.”

Out of curiosity, I asked whether Yano thinks a computer or artificial intelligence will someday solve Slay the Spire and beat any winnable seed, as mods that add AI gameplay assistants in the original game are bad. “I don’t care if an AI solves Slay the Spire because the joy is in playing the game and experiencing the content,” Yano replied. “Chess is largely solved by really sophisticated algorithms, but making mistakes is fun; maybe just as fun as making great choices and seeing them play out.”

Finally, Yano also explained how Mega Crit sees alternate Slay the Spire modes in the sequel, like Daily Runs and Endless Mode, which are not as widely discussed online as the core mode. “Things like the Daily Runs, Custom, and Endless mode were more to satiate questions like ‘but what if a run kept going forever?’ and ‘how would randomized rules shake up STS?'” Yano explained.

Slay the Spire 2 releases in early access on March 5 at 12pm CT on Steam.

The post ‘We’re microtransaction haters’: Slay the Spire 2 devs explain approach to early access, confirm easier modding and win streak tracker appeared first on Destructoid.

Marathon is finally out. The game, which saw huge activity during its free-to-play server slam, replicated its previous success by opening to over 86,000 players, this time at a $40 price tag. Of course, this is being described as a “flop” by some, because we simply cannot have nice things in 2026.

Negative narratives around basically anything nowadays tend to form rather quickly, often propagated by people (and of course bots) who never actually experienced the thing they’re hating. It seems that nowadays, following the “Fall of Concord” back in 2024, games have to blow it out of the park every single time lest they be considered complete failures.

Highguard was a recent example, and even if that game doesn’t really scream quality at the top of its lungs, it certainly didn’t deserve the hate train coming its way, boarded almost exclusively by those without any hours clocked in the title.

And now Marathon is on the chopping block.

During its development, Marathon was marred by problems and hitches. It had several directors swapped out, had a few playtests that weren’t so well-received by those who participated in them, and so on. It crossed out every prerequisite for “development hell,” indicating the actual release would be a terrible experience for Bungie and perhaps the final nail in its coffin.

But that turned out not to be true, even during the server slam. It had over 130,000 concurrent players at that point and has over 86,000 now that the game costs $40 U.S. dollars. Nothing about Marathon tells us that it’s a flop or a failure or even underperforming for that matter.

And those are just the Steam numbers, which I imagine represent about half of its total player base, if not less.

The hate train keeps chugging along, however, no matter what.

While browsing X, I spotted one user arguing that, since Marathon is performing worse than Destiny and the recently released Slay the Spire 2 (which costs about 50 percent less than Marathon), it must be considered a “complete flop of a game” and, of course, as “Concord 3.0″ (the other one being Highguard).

“Marathon is dead on arrival,” another user wrote. Dexerto, a video game outlet, also compared Slay the Spire 2‘s performance to Marathon, saying the former “beats out” Bungie’s shooter, as if the two were ever comparable, both in price and genre.

The narrative is forming and slowly being propagated by so many people and even news outlets, who use superficial arguments to frame a game as a failure despite the fact that it had probably earned over three and a half million USD if we go by Steam’s concurrent numbers alone, which are in fact much larger, especially when consoles are taken into account.

And what’s worse, it’s people who either didn’t play the game or haven’t even seen what it has to offer. Those who did say it’s a good title, with it having 81 percent positive reviews on Steam at the time of writing, which improved as the launch day progressed, and are set to grow as time goes by.

Compare that to Highguard‘s 45 percent and its myriad of regions that have it at mostly negative or even worse. Highguard was also a free game that ended up flopping, whereas Marathon is already raking in a lot of cash that should see it sustained for the foreseeable future.

Online arguments and narratives have become so toxic and tiresome, to the point where I’m almost willing to give up on trying to reason with people and to pragmatically view every single game on a case-by-case basis. Why do we have to go out of our way to frame things negatively before they’re even out or without trying them for ourselves, at least for a little while?

I have every hope that Marathon will succeed and grow into a great game, because as I noted in one of my recent features, its art direction deserves all the praise it can get, as that’d prove to developers that giving a damn about looks (not just in terms of graphics) is crucial for a successful title.

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