Sure, we’re only seven weeks into the year, but Mewgenics has already established itself as one of this year’s breakout success stories. There are those that argue the latest game from the mind behind The Binding of Isaac was always guaranteed to be a hit, and there’s a sliver of truth to that. However, seeing it swiftly surpass a million units sold and beat Hades 2’s all-time Steam peak player count is a genuine, pleasant surprise. That surprise extends to the developers of the game itself, with Mewgenics’ co-creator Tyler Glaiel saying that its huge success has “blindsided” him, greatly exceeding the amount of Steam wishlists it had before launch.
14 years in the making, I’m delighted to see Mewgenics quickly establishing itself as one of the best roguelikes of recent times. This year’s top-reviewed game so far, according to its average scores on both Metacritic and Opencritic, the frenzy around its remarkable replayability and huge Steam player counts has clearly led to a lot of positive, word-of-mouth recommendations.
Taking to X soon after announcing that Mewgenics had cleared the one-million-units-sold mark, Glaiel reveals that the game had an impressive amount of wishlists before launch, but nowhere near enough to make him think it would translate into so many sales.
“Some fun stats”, he says in a post. “[Mewgenics] had ~400k wishlists before reviews came out. Shot up to ~600k after reviews/before release. For those saying its success was expected based on pedigree, week one sales for games are usually a fraction of wishlists. So we both got a bit blindsided by this haha.” By “both”, Glaiel is seemingly referring to co-creator and regular long-time collaborator, Edmund McMillen.
It’s true that, in most cases, a game won’t convert all of its Steam wishlists into sales at launch, but there are several high-profile and recent examples where word-of-mouth has led to more sales than wishlists, just like Mewgenics has achieved here. According to data analyzed by Games Discover Co, some of last year’s most notable indie success stories, like REPO and Schedule 1, recorded huge differences in their first-week sales versus their wishlist totals. Both games reportedly sold around 1.3 million copies in their first week, despite having just 182,000 and 529,000 Steam wishlists, respectively.
In another post, Glaiel shares some more insight into who is actually playing Mewgenics. The top ten countries in terms of players is, according to him, the USA, China, Germany, UK, Canada, France, Russia, Australia, Spain, and Poland, in that order.
Glaeil also pledges to add new official translations for Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian – again, a clue as to the areas of the world that are playing Mewgenics the most. “The game was enough of a success [that] we might give the greenlight on a few more languages now too”, he says.
There’s a good chance that more Mewgenics-style hits will appear this year – I’m optimistic it’ll be joined by more indies in the ‘one million copies sold’ club. Surely, at least one game in this year’s slate will also topple its 90 average score. GTA 6, perhaps? Forza Horizon 6? Another surprising indie? Who knows. Regardless, Mewgenics has been a ray of positive sunshine in a mostly gloomy start to 2026.
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