The deckbuilder Slay the Spire was not only a marked success in the roguelite genre, but also just in general–developers at Mega Crit even refer to it as “genre-defining.” After a slow few opening weeks in 2017, it accumulated sales through its lifetime amounting to over a million, and it still gathers thousands of players daily. That’s impressive, considering its format and run-based nature, but clearly people liked its immensely replayable take on card combat. It has now almost been a decade since it first came out, and fans have dogpiled on the chance to play “the long awaited” Slay the Spire 2, which released earlier today.

The trend of the game’s success seems to continue, as the sequel’s launch day coincides with the full release of Bungie’s gigantic live-service extraction-shooter project Marathon, and it’s outperforming it by a wide margin. Marathon has held steady around 85k concurrent players today, but Slay the Spire 2 has nearly tripled that at around 245k. This is by no means a preemptive judgement of Marathon’s success, but it is indicative of an increasingly common phenomenon in the industry: indie games achieving massive numbers and notoriety rivaling that of multi-million dollar enterprises. Last year, for example, Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong pulled millions in sales–and the latter game literally crashed the Steam store with the amount of traffic it brought. This begs the question then, what’s all the hype around Slay the Spire 2?

Well, if the first one was beloved for what it offered, the sequel apparently offers even more of that. And the kicker? Slay the Spire 2 is just in early access. According to Mega Crit, the game features the previous roster of characters and more, brand new environments, brand new cards, and day one co-op. That last part’s a big deal, and a first for the now series. Slay the Spire gameplay with friends sounds incredibly enticing, and it seems the community agrees that even beyond that, it’s already a hit. A brief scroll through the Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews for the game reveals that many consider it to be everything the first one was and better. That’s compounding success right there, and also a great reason to hop on the bandwagon and check out the game.