Slay the Spire 2 launch briefly crashes Steam storefront

Slay the Spire 2 launched in Early Access on Steam in the early afternoon, and the sudden rush to download briefly stalled the storefront. Players were met with stalled store pages and purchases that got lost in limbo, though the digital chaos lasted only about a half hour or so.

The game quickly dominated Valve’s concurrent charts with over 185,000 players, nearly double what Marathon was drawing, despite being a single-player roguelike built around card-based play.

Other developers shifted or delayed their releases to avoid Slay the Spire 2’s launch blast radius. The developer behind Esoteric Ebb said moving that game’s release from the 5th to the 3rd let them play Slay the Spire 2 all evening, and that Steam didn’t crash for half an hour on the 3rd.

Owners of the first Slay the Spire get a $2.50 discount on the new release, bringing the price down from $25 to $22.50, and there’s a bundle for both games for $28 — Slay the Spire, an all-time great, for less than a quarter pounder.

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