MegaCrit’s roguelike Slay the Spire has sold more than 1.5 million copies since it first popped up as an early access title in late 2017.
It’s a milestone the dev team mentioned during a postmortem for the game during GDC this week, and one that comes just months after Slay the Spire emerged from early access in January.
Despite that, MegaCrit’s Casey Yano says that the game didn’t find that much success in the earliest days of early access. The first three days saw maybe 800 copies sold and he felt like most of the keys they had sent out to YouTubers and press “went out into the void,” something that had the team worried about what the future for the game would be.
Slay the Spire’s saving grace was when a Chinese streamer discovered the game and gave sales a much-needed shot in the arm. China now accounts for 30 percent of Slay the Spire’s sales so far.
After only managing 800 sales in those first few days, Slay the Spire had sold 700,000 copies by April 2018, around 3 months into early access. Less than a year later, that number has now more than doubled to 1.5 million.