Mewgenics, the latest release by Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, launched yesterday. Within six hours the game sold over 150k copies, made back its development costs, and leaped to the top of Steam’s Top Sellers list.
Speaking to IGN, Glaiel revealed that the game has already a bigger release than any of the expansions for The Binding of Issac, the prior game released by the duo and itself an indie darling.
Mcmillen revealed that prior to Mewgenics, The Binding of Issac: Rebirth sold 40k copies on its release date, while Mewgenics sold 152k in its first five hours. He added: “Isn’t that kind of insane?” The original Binding of Isaac managed to sell over 700k copies in less than a year after launch, an impressive figure that’s on track to be beaten in short order.
Since its release yesterday, the game leaped to a peak concurrent player count of 65,962 on Steam. In addition, it has beaten out Overwatch‘s big relaunch on Steam’s Top Selling page. That game is no slouch by the way, itself seeing new peaks not seen in years.
Mewgenics, for those unaware, is a cat-focused tactical Rogue-like, which Eurogamer previewed recently with much acclaim and praise. In it, Christian Donland wrote: “If I have one point to leave you with – other than the fact that the soundtrack is rich with brilliant original songs – it’s this: the core of Mewgenics may be simple and familiar, but the game that unfolds across all these runs is huge, and obviously so, even from my position about nine or ten hours in.”
To celebrate the launch, both Mcmillen and Glaiel celebrated with a custom Mewgenics cake, which you can see below. Eurogamer enquired into what sort of cake this was, and has been told via a PR spokesperson it was a vanilla cake with chocolate bits. Lovely.
