The developers behind indie hit Slay The Spire 2 have a unique take on piracy, as the sequel continues to draw in thousands of players.
Slay The Spire 2 has already become a massive hit on Steam since it launched in early access earlier this month, beating the likes of Marathon, Apex Legends, and Arc Raiders in terms of peak player counts.
The roguelike deckbuilder sequel isn’t that different to the 2019 original, but there is a somewhat significant shift under the game’s hood. After developers Mega Crit originally planned to create the sequel in the Unity engine, the team pivoted to the open source Godot – after the former introduced a controversial policy whereby developers, under certain conditions, would be charged each time someone installed their game.
Unity has since backtracked on this policy, but Mega Crit decided to stick with Godot in the creation of Slay The Spire 2. Why does this matter? Well, along with it being uncommon for major games to be made in an open source engine, it also presents major piracy risks.
The use of an open source engine doesn’t mean Slay The Spire 2 is open source itself, but it does make it more susceptible to people who want to decompile it to see the game’s code – something which isn’t typically available for other games.
While you might think the possibility of people distributing the game for free would be a big concern for an indie team like Mega Crit, the team’s lead programmer, Jake Card, had a surprise response when asked if it had planned any ways to prevent people from stealing Slay The Spire 2’s assets or code.
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‘Honestly, we don’t really,’ Card replied on Reddit. ‘We figure people who want to pirate it will find ways to pirate it, so there’s no reason to waste dev resources on it.’
On another Reddit thread, when someone highlighted that Slay The Spire 2 can be decompiled, Card replied: ‘It’d make me extremely happy to find out that other game developers learned something from reading through our code and our scenes.’
For Slay The Spire 2, the game’s popularity might negate concerns around piracy, but it’s still an unusual attitude to take on the subject. Although, if you pirate the game you won’t be able to access the sequel’s multiplayer features, so it might encourage some people to pay for the game later.
If they aren’t too fussed about piracy, Mega Crit is passionately against serving up in-game monetisation. ‘We’re microtransaction haters,’ the studio’s co-founder, Casey Yano, recently told Destructoid.
So don’t expect any gacha elements or expensive cosmetic DLC in the final release. Slay The Spire 2 is only available in early access on Steam, but there are plans to bring it to consoles when it does fully launch.
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