This $3 Steam game is outselling big new releases with hilarious voice chat spells

You’ve likely cast a spell in plenty of fantasy video games, but I’m betting you’ve never done it like the way Mage Arena handles it. Where most games would bind an attack to a button, Mage Arena prompts players to say the spell out loud into their microphones – and the absurd mechanic has helped the tiny indie game blow up.

Mage Arena is a multiplayer game where 4 wizards enter an arena to duke it out with magic. You’ve got to infiltrate the enemy base, capture their flag, and bring it back to your team area. Once it’s yours, the enemy team can’t respawn anymore. The game ends once you defeat all of your rivals post flag-capture. There are other mechanics, like crafting, minions, and different types of weapons, but the main attraction is definitely the spell casting.

It’s a simple concept, but the beauty of the game is in its voice chat. A spell won’t be activated unless you say it out loud. You’d think this would be annoying, and depending on who you’re playing with, it could be. But Mage Arena uses proximity chat, so the match isn’t just a barrage of screeches where you can’t make anything out.

The game’s miniscule price point definitely contributes to its popularity, especially since it’s currently going for a discount as the developer tries to iron out all the bugs. But what’s really shot the game up the charts and allowed it to perform better than recent big budget releases like Tales of the Shire and Doom: The Dark Ages is that its userbase is playing up the bit.

Videos of people in matches where they dramatically belt out the spell names are going viral and piling up millions of views on sites like TikTok. Imagine the most intense dungeon master you’ve ever met trying to drum up the action for a rap audience after spending weeks designing a campaign and you start getting an idea of how absurd things can sound. At this point, people are jumping in with audio filters and medieval accents to take things up a notch. It’s probably a matter of time before dedicated voice actors jump in to steal the show.

Mage Arena is still in early access, and it’s too early to tell if the game will have any longevity. For now, it seems like the perfect game to mess around with friends and it’s getting plenty of airtime on places like Twitch. Eventually, it’ll go back to its original $4.99 price point, but that’s still pretty cheap.

Even if it does turn out to be a flash in the pan, though, it’s an impressive showing for someone’s first game that isn’t even finished yet. According to PC Gamer, creator jrsjams is only making around a dollar per sale. But with a current concurrent player peak of over 16,000 players and an average of 5,000 players online at any given point, the potential profits seem promising for a single creator. To put that into perspective: Skull and Bones, Ubisoft’s purported quadruple A game, only ever saw a high of around 2,600 players.

“Insanely good proof that a fun game concept will always beat graphical fidelity,” reads one Steam review.

“My first battle in a public lobby was 6 guys rushing each other, everyone screaming FIREBALL! FIREBALL! MAGIC MISSILE!! at the top of their lungs, which then turned into everyone absolutely losing their ♥♥♥♥, and laughing as hard as possible,” says the top review on the game’s Steam store page. “I don’t care if I never play this game again, that experience alone was worth the price of entry.”