Since its release last Tuesday, Mewgenics has taken the gaming world by storm. The tactical roguelite has shattered expectations and has already run rings around McMillen’s previous juggernaut, The Binding of Isaac.
To put its success into perspective, we’ve pulled together everything you need to know about the game’s Metacritic score, total sales, concurrent player numbers at launch, and more.
The success in part we’re sure was due to the decision to skip Early Access. In our interview with co-creator Tyler Glaiel, he explained: “I don’t like Early Access and think it’s a bad fit for most games, especially ones with an actual campaign.”
Metacritic score – 89
Earning the coveted Metacritic “Must Play” badge, Mewgenics launched with an impressive score of 89. Its user score of 8.2 isn’t too shabby either.
You might be wondering how that stacks up against other acclaimed roguelikes, such as Hades 2 and Balatro. Mike recently crunched the numbers, and Mewgenics currently ranks as the joint 6th best-received roguelike on the platform.
Among McMillen’s own titles, it sits neatly between The Binding of Isaac (88) and Super Meat Boy (89).
As for OpenCritic, the game has also achieved a score of 89, with 95% of critics saying that they would recommend the game.
Current reported sales – 1 Million in a week
Critical success is one thing, but the sales figures for Mewgenics are staggering. The game recouped its development costs in just three hours, hit 250,000 sales in under 12 hours, and doubled that to 500,000 in just 36 hours. Now, we’ve just had word that the game has hit the impressive milestone of 1 million copies sold just one week after releases.
To put that into perspective, McMillen’s previous sales record was 40,000 copies of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth in a single day.
To celebrate these impressive milestones, McMillen and Glaiel did so in the most fitting way possible: with a cat-shaped cake.
Peak concurrent players – 115,428
As we reported in our recent feature, Mewgenics made a big splash when it launched, with a peak of 65,962 players in its first 24 hours.
This made for the 7th biggest rogue launch of all-time on the platform, behind only The Binding of Issac: Rebirth, Risk of Rain 2, 太吾绘卷 The Scroll of Taiwu, Megabonk, Hades 2, and Elden Ring: Nightreign, respectively.
Over the weekend, the game surged to 115,428 concurrent players, surpassing even Hades 2’s peak.
Steam reviews – 22,189 (Very Positive)
Of course, this is the figure most likely to shift rapidly, but at the time of writing, Mewgenics has amassed 22,189 reviews on Steam. The vast majority are pretty glowing, with just 1,626 marked as negative.
Among those positive verdicts is our own review, where I concluded: “Given the hype surrounding Mewgenics, I was concerned it might fall short of its lofty expectations, but I’m pleased to say it looks set to wear the same badge of quality as McMillen’s previous work.”
