Since last checking in, sales of Slay the Spire have risen to over 1.5 million and the game has seen some interesting growth in unexpected markets. In a talk given at GDC, Mega Crit announced that Slay the Spire has seen a sharp rise of interest in China, accounting for nearly half of all sales.

“The thing that’s really important here is that China made up 43% of all sales(…) and this is before any localisation was available in the game, so there were a lot of confused players.”

The spokesman for Mega Crit stated that the bounty of Chinese players demonstrated the importance of localisation efforts in games, after so many non-English speaking players were left confused when first purchasing the game. He went on to speak about how localising to one area, in this instance China, created a sort of ripple effect, creating demand in “Korea, Russia and Japan”, leading to further localisations down the line.

“We started our localisation efforts, and so the game is now translated to (…) 18 languages.” There’s a lesson here to be learned about the need for localisation and translation in games to maximise their market potential. After all, figures revealed at GDC show that only 41% of Slay the Spire’s player base is English-speaking. In the words of Slay the Spire’s spokesman, “Don’t forget China, there’s a lot of people there!”

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It’s hardly surprising that Slay the Spire has seen such a success, however. While it was still in early-access, which ended in January 2019, the game had sold well over 1,000,000 copies – no small feat for game of its genre.

“The feedback and reception for the game has been far more than any developer could hope for and we’d like to sincerely thank all of you for playing the game, creating amazing content, and even starting riots over boots,” Mega Crit wrote. “We hope to pay you all back by working our butts off.”

Mega Crit has steadily introduced new features to Slay the Spire, including daily challenge runs and a new character, the Defect. The new Custom game mode introduced this week allows players to select mutators for bespoke runs, and Mega Crit says it’ll act as a basis for adding new challenges, such as an Endless Mode and mod support.

When Ali reviewed Slay the Spire, he came away extremely impressed. Steam users have been pretty enthusiastic about Slay the Spire too, awarding it an “Overwhelmingly Positive” aggregate review score.