Analysts say Slay the Spire 2 is the best-performing deckbuilder of all time—and the competition isn't close

Slay the Spire 2 was an immediate success, delivering a top-selling launch day performance. But as more data emerges, it's become increasingly clear that Slay the Spire 2's launch is a historic record-setter. According to Newzoo, PC Gamer's official data partner, StS 2 is the best-performing deckbuilder of all time—and it's leading by a massive margin.

Steam peak concurrent users, while a flawed metric for a game's ongoing health, provide the clearest image of how Slay the Spire 2 is separated from other card game heavy hitters by orders of magnitude. Balatro peaked at 44,000 concurrent users in January 2025, Slay the Spire 1 at 57,000 in December 2025, and Monster Train 2 at 18,500 shortly after its May 2025 launch. Three days after its early access launch, Slay the Spire 2 peaked at 575,000 concurrents.

"That is more than 13 times Balatro's peak, and this is a $24.99 paid Early Access title with no console version yet. Mega Crit confirmed 3 million copies sold in the first week. At that price point, that implies roughly $75M gross before Valve's cut," Newzoo analysts told PC Gamer.

Meanwhile, Newzoo's proprietary tracking of active users across PC and console shows Balatro leading other deckbuilders and card battlers with approximately 1.76 million monthly active users between January 2025 and February 2026. Early daily active user figures for Slay the Spire 2, however, "suggest it will lead the category by a substantial margin."

With only a Steam player base to work with, Slay the Spire 2 "averaged 1.08 million users per day across the first 11 days with no sign of decay" according to Newzoo data.

"On concurrent players and first-week sales, this is the best-performing deckbuilder on record," Newzoo says.

Newzoo attributes Slay the Spire 2's unprecedented launch to a number of factors—chief among them being the fact that it benefited from seven years of player anticipation. Slay the Spire "had no sequel, no spin-off, no dilution," which meant "every player who finished StS1 and wanted more was still waiting, with nowhere else to go."

And there were likely more of those players than anyone had ever realized. Newzoo notes that, as a purely solo game, StS1 "does not generate drama, discourse, or content creator spectacle proportional to its actual installed base." Collective hype is hard to quantify from a population of players content with quietly churning through dozens of hours of ascension runs.

Slay the Spire 2 is an interesting comparison to Silksong, which had already left a broad cultural footprint before it launched with roughly 2.4 million monthly active users on PC. "StS2, with a fraction of the noise, is tracking close to that," Newzoo said.

Mega Crit's reputation as a developer likely played a role, too. StS1 earned a high level of consumer trust: Its early access wasn't weighed down with microtransaction cruft, season passes, or development scandals, and Mega Crit was clear that players could expect the same with the sequel—despite whatever threats of cosmetic consumerism those players might make.

"In a market fatigued by monetization friction, that is a meaningful conversion driver," Newzoo said.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano said he suspects that StS2 has "broken past obscurity," and its reputation is drawing in challenge-oriented players who wouldn't typically choose a roguelike deckbuilder.

"As a very competitive person in videogames, I feel like if somebody says a game is hard, no matter what genre it is—this racing game has very interesting competitive chops, or there's all these cool records and ways to creatively express yourself in this driving game—I'd be interested, even though I don't really play racing games at all," Yano said. "I think we're starting to attract a different type of player."