Mega Crit's Slay the Spire has sold 1.5m copies
And more than 40% of those sales came from China
Slay the Spire has sold more than 1.5 million copies, developer Mega Crit said at GDC yesterday.
In a talk attended by PCGamesN, the Seattle-based indie developer confirmed that it had sold an additional 500,000 copies to the sales it amassed by June 2018, while still in Early Access.
Notably, 43% of all the game's sales came from China, and that's despite not having localised the game for that region at first. Mega Crit subsequently localised for China -- among 18 language translations in total -- and now just 41% of its player-base is in English-speaking territories.
This underlines the growing importance of China as a market for indie developers. At Melbourne International Games Week last year, we heard Mountains founder Ken Wong describe the unexpected success of Florence in the region.
In fact, the proportion of the games sales in China are broadly similar to those reported by Mega Crit for Slay the Spire.
"This room would really miss out if they didn't hear about the power of the Asian market," Wong said. "We haven't shared this before, but half of the sales of Florence are in China. That's more than the US audience. More people have played Florence in Mandarin than in English.
"And that's with almost no promotion, because we're only on iOS; we're not even on Android yet. That's a big thing. Your business model - all of you here - should include an Asian strategy, because potentially half of your market is there, if not more."