The card roguelike Slay the Spire 2 was liked by many players at launch, but not everyone appreciated Mega Crit's approach to balance tuning. After the update was released, the game started receiving negative reviews, hence the recent "mostly negative" rating.
Usually, in such situations, sales drop sharply, but this did not happen with Slay the Spire 2. This case was analyzed by the founder and head of the analytical company IndieBI, Tom Kaczmarczyk, who spoke about the importance of reviews at the Digital Dragons conference:
The social weight of a game with "mostly positive" reviews and 1000 reviews is likely to be higher than a game with "overwhelmingly positive" reviews with 600 reviews. A thousand will work better.
The Chinese community, where Slay the Spire 2 has a huge player base, did not accept the changes and started review bombing — lowering the rating on Steam by leaving negative reviews.
Kaczmarczyk believes the game will survive this, although such a collapse in reviews could have been a death sentence for other releases:
The rating dropped to rock bottom — to such a level that in any other case, people would say, "the game is dead, it's unplayable. Obviously, no one likes it."
However, despite the flood of negativity, according to Kaczmarczyk, sales of Slay the Spire 2 in China "did not fall that much." Even a surge of negative reviews could not sink a game that already has a strong reputation and a loyal audience.
Development of Slay the Spire 2 in "early access" is gradually continuing. The developers are studying feedback and adjusting the balance.