Lee Williams, who you may know from bizarre-o dungeon-crawler Cryptmaster, which has over 1,100 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam, put a finer point on it: “One lesson I learned from Cryptmaster was, ‘next time, make a roguelike…’ Lots of people say they want innovation and risk-taking but it seems that very few people actually do.”

Gamesradar is reporting something Chris Zukowski says again and again – 90% of the success of your game is decided when you pick the genre. Despite wishing and hoping, the reality is that your genre makes more of a difference than how good you, or your game, is. And those preferences are fickle from year to year.

There is always lightning bolt successes like Balatro, but those games are more akin to winning the lottery. Roguelike games were absolute moneymakers 2 years ago, but in 2025 the genre is starting to slip with other categories starting to rise to the top. This is a problem when games sometimes take 2-3 years to make. It’s another reason to make games quickly and cheaply.

There’s always working on games for fun and as a personal project; but if you’re trying to actually make a living on your work, you need to be aware of market conditions.

“I applaud any indie that tries to make something new and I think that is a big strength of indies, but unfortunately that means relying on luck for whether it works out or not,” Michele Pirovano says. “I was lucky with my gamble on merging city builders and roguelikes, but maybe if I had released it a year before it would not have worked… I think that reducing the risk for indies while still being original means making smaller games to reduce dev time, and I see that advice being given often, but that however does not translate well into Steam sales, as players prefer longer and deeper games.