Roguelike vs Metroidvania
Roguelike vs Metroidvania
I spend a fair amount of time in Google Trends, Google Analytics, YouTube Analytics, YouTube Studio, Sqaurespace Analytics and many more making sure that I am optimizing my time to create and give this outlet the best chance at success.
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One day I was looking through the analytics and there was a suggestion for content, which piqued my interest: “Roguelike vs Metroidvania”
I found the idea weird and confusing at first. I don’t think that this is getting sourced from people searching this term and not finding what they are looking for, instead, I think the algorithm is just showing me two things in a Venn diagram that are overlapping and is lacking content. How can you possibly compare two very different genres like this? We wanted to look at which genre would be victorious and not what the differences are between the two. That’s easy enough.
Rogulikes and Metroidvanias feel like two of the more popular genres at the moment right now especially in the indie scene. This could just be from my perspective. It’s possible that I can’t see the forest from the trees because both of these genres are near the top of of my personal favourites.
It does feel like the mainstream games are starting to adopt many elements from these two genres, similar to how RPG elements started to ooze into every game about 15-20 years ago. We now live in a world where almost every game has a skill tree and side quests. Having thought about the topic for long enough, I started to entertain the idea about how to even compare the two and come up with ideas about how to compare two very different things.
The first thing that came to mind would be to look at the best reviewed games of the year and give a point to whichever genre had the highest in each year. An obvious place to look would be sales, but that could be tricky with most developers keeping those numbers close to the chest unless to make a milestone announcement. The Game Awards is another place to look and try to allocate points based on winners and nominees. Then we thought we could get some real time data by polling our audience and looking at Google Trends as well. Finally, IGN constantly updates their “Top 100 Games of All Time” list and we could take a look at that list to see how many of each genre make an appearance and at what rank. These are six categories that should give us a better indication of which genre is king.
Highest Ranked Game Per Year
Even though 2024 is only about a quarter of the way through, we already have two top tier games from each genre. Balatro would be the highest rated roguelike so far with a 92 average and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is the highest rated Metroidvania with 87. Even though there is still lots of 2024 remaining for the sake of this argument, we can award this year to Roguelike. In 2023, the highest rated was Blasphemous 2, which is a Metroidvania. In 2022, it was Rogue Legacy 2, which is a Roguelike. In 2021, it was Metroid Dread, which is a Metroidvania. In 2020, Roguelike wins with Hades. In 2019, Roguelike wins with Slay The Spire. In 2018, Roguelike wins with Dead Cells, which is a little bit of Metroidvania, but is primarily a Roguelike. Finally, in 2017, Metroidvania wins with Hollow Knight.
Edge: Roguelike 5-3
Sales
If we are looking at the best in each category each year, it would be Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Balatro. In the first few weeks, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown sold around 300k, and in just under a month, Balatro sold one million copies. Unfortunately, this is not a straightforward comparison for many reasons. First, there is the general Ubisoft disdain that a lot of gamers have towards the company, despite people like you and me creating the game, which happened to be one of the best Metroidvanias in year. These people would rather be petty, instead of supporting exactly the type of games that they want from the company. Secondly, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was around 50 bucks compared to Balatro being around 15. Oddly enough, if you do some rote calculations, both of the sales equal 15 million, but the big difference would be budget.
If we look at the best of each genre from 2023, it would be Blasphemous 2 and Darkest Dungeon 2. Darkest Dungeon 2 sold around 300k in its first month, but it also sold another 300k in early access, which does move this comparison slightly into the grey area. According to some sources, Blasphemous 2 has sold around 250k units so far.
Edge: Roguelike
The Game Awards
The Game Awards might get a lot of flak for too many advertisements and not enough time for the developers to give their acceptance speech, but it hasn’t even been around for a decade yet. Look at the Academy Awards. They have been around for almost a century, they are still making mistakes, implanting changes and making adjustments from year to year. The Game Awards are voted on by a panel of experts from around the industry with different tastes and perspectives, which means that it is a microcosm of the gaming industry at large. In 2021, Metroid Dread won best Action/Advneture Game and that same year Returnal won Best Action Game. In 2020, Hades won Best Indie Game and Best Action Game. In 2018, Dead Cells won Best Action Game.
Edge Roguelike 4-1
POLL
We polled our audience of almost 10k people to see if they prefer one genre over the other and the results were not as close as I expected them to be. The results were 85% preferring Metroidvania genre compared to the 15% that prefer doing run after run in Roguelikes.
Edge: Metroidvania
Best Games of All Time
IGN is a hive mind of gamers and when they update their best list of all time, it changes as new personnel come and go. For the most part, there are occasional new additions and minor adjustment, but this list is something that the general gaming population can agree on. When it comes to Metroidvanias and Roguelikes, IGN had five games from both categories combined finding their way into the Best Games of All Time. Hollow Knight came in at 54th, Metroid Prime at 42nd, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night at 14th, Hades at 13th and Super Metroid at 5th.
Edge: Metroidvania
Google Trends
The most concrete answer for comparing the two, is likely the simplest. Compare the two genres in Google Trends dating back to 2004. The comparison isn’t even close. Even considering that the Roguelike genre didn’t see a renaissance until about ten years ago, roguelikes were still trending drastically higher than Metroidvanias
Edge: Roguelike
Final Score, Thoughts and Conclusions
There is no right or wrong answer. Whatever genre you like the most is the right answer for you and whatever category you put more value on would lead to different answers. Is the best genre the one that has better sales or the one that has more games considered best games ever, its inconclusive, but for the sake of pleasing the algorithmic gods, here is the definitive answer!
Overall, the Roguelike genre comes out ahead of Metroidvania with a score of 4-2. What does it all mean? I think the biggest factual indicator of popularity between the two genres is Google Trends. You can’t argue with actual data dating back to 2004.
As for the other categories where we compared, it largely landed in the favor of Roguelikes. It’s also a genre that can be infused into other genres much easier, similar to how RPG elements started to slip into most other genres of gaming a few decades ago. It also feels like the genre with more room for exploration and experimentation. It feels like there is only so many ways that you can have gated abilities and backtracking.
Only recently, Hades scratched the surface of ways to incorporate story into the genre if you need an example of what potential is in the genre. If you need a definitive answer when it comes to comparing Roguelikes and Metroidvanias, Roguelikes seem to have been the more popular genre dating back decades and look to have the brighter future.