"Roguelike can be anything": Krafton exec is very tired of being pitched "Balatro with different cards"

"Genre is a misnomer"

At Digital Dragons this year I somehow found myself attending a panel about games industry investment and publishing deals, featuring various senior M&A people gathered under the dread banner of "Capital Reality". It felt like visiting another planet, occupied by towering creatures of gold and green paper, who spoke an earwax-curdling vocabulary of phrases like "there's dry powder out there, but I'm seeing dealflop".

The best practice when you are stranded on a strange new world is to bond with local lifeforms in the most elementary and primordial terms. In this case, I established a point of connection with Victor Lee, director of Europe investments for Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton. It turns out he is as weary and confused and petulant about the abundance of roguelike deckbuilders as I.

"I feel like the trend cycle in gaming is just getting shorter and shorter," Lee began, when asked how pitching developers should choose between pursuing a popular fad, or striking out afresh. "I remember when survival crafting was a big thing, and then it was, you know, deckbuilding roguelikes, right? I've had maybe 250 roguelike deckbuilders in the last 12 months. I don't know how to choose. Would you? Like, they're all Balatros with different cards. I don't know how to choose one.

"And that's a roguelike deckbuilder problem," he went on. "I'm sorry if anybody here is making a roguelike deckbuilder. But that genre is is too narrow for you to differentiate far enough from anything else, right? Genre is a misnomer. Roguelike isn't a genre. Roguelike can be anything. It can be an FPS or a deckbuilder, anything. If you tell me, you have a roguelike game, I have no idea what you're making."

Having gotten all this ennui out of his system, Lee had some general tips about trend-chasing, beginning with the chilly argument that you're more likely to succeed once if you can afford to fail several times over. "Trying to follow the keyword that's hot on Steam - if you can execute it in a month, fine," he said. "If you can pump out 12 roguelike deckbuilders in a month and see what sticks, sure do it, right? I might even fund it. But if you bring me one roguelike deckbuilder that's going to take you a year and a half... I don't know if I'll be playing that in 2028, right?

"So you have to think about what trends you're following, and how low that barrier of entry is. If you're sitting there thinking, 'I can make a friendslop game'. Yeah - so could everyone probably. If it's easy for you, it's probably easy for everyone else.

"So if you're spending a very small amount of money, taking a very small amount of risk to get something out there very quickly, to see what happens - great. If you're betting your life on a very low risk, low barrier-to-entry genre, really think about how many people actually play that, right? Really think about how big that space is. And again, it was friendslop last year - this year, I don't know what it is right now."

As a publisher exec, Lee feels most comfortable working with developers who are nuts about a particular genre, even if that genre has lost its monetisation mojo. "I would rather work with, you know, RPG players who have only played RPGs and they want to make their RPG and that's going to deliver in 2029. You have no idea if the market is going to be hot or not, but at least I can trust the team and their obsession about RPGs, and the experience they bring from having played or made other RPG games, and that goes for every genre. Even if it is a roguelike deckbuilder."

I tried to get to the bottom of the roguelike phenomenon in an interview article from last year. Amongst other things, we should distinguish between the hardy perennial "roguelike" and the more vigorous and shallow-rooted "roguelite" subspecies. Actually, maybe just go read the comments on that piece. Many opinions were had.

I'd have raised this with Lee during the Digital Dragons event, but unfortunately, the panelists smelled the absence of diamonds in my pockets, and set up an unholy screeching. I escaped by cold-pitching a roguelike deckbuilder about dealflop, which put everybody present to sleep. I then opened another door at random, and found myself in a roomful of lawyers discussing arbitration clauses. If you receive this message, please emergency deploy a panel presentation about cute gun designs or similar - I am running out of air.

This article was based on a press trip to Digital Dragons, with the event's organisers paying for travel and accommodation.