A single bagel with a card fight Slay the Spire has already been bought more than a million times, although the game is still in early access. How did the developers do it?
Slay the Spire is the first game of the Mega Crit Games indie team on Steam. The game has unassuming graphics (especially for the design of cards) and simple gameplay, but it offers a wide variety of gameplay due to the variety of artifacts and cards from which the player collects a deck.
Access to the game was opened in November 2017, there has not been a final release yet, but the audience of the title is constantly growing, reviews for it are mostly extremely positive. Judging by the reviews of players, the success of Slay the Spire is explained by the following factors:
1) Dynamic, addictive and addictive gameplay. Reviews in the style of “Stuck for 6 hours in it” and “Stuck for a whole week” are not uncommon.
2) A combination of the strategic part (deckbuilding) with a strong randomness in battles. Players perceive a loss not as their failure, but as bad luck, and return to the game again and again.
3) A combination of two popular genres. Card video games after Hearthstone are one of the most trending genres, and bagels on Steam have had a large fan audience since The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky and FTL.
4) Constant support from developers. This is the main success factor. The game is already localized into 13 languages. Every week Mega Crit Games releases a new patch – and it’s not just about fixing bugs. The two main goals of patches are to add additional content to the game and add features that players ask for. There is an active community around the game, to which the developers listen carefully.
In fact, Slay the Spire is a service-supported game, so players regularly return to it to try out updates. This model fits perfectly to bagels, which shows the success of the game.
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