Last Friday was the 1 year anniversary of Splattercat playing a little game name Vampire Survivors.
The game went viral from there, getting covered by more and more streamers and selling millions of copies and becoming one of the most played games of 2022.
Side Note: This genre is so new there is no settled name for it. Candidate names in the scene:
- Bullet Heaven (instead of a Bullet Hell)
- VS-like (VS = Vampire Survivors)
- Action Roguelike
- Hoard survivors.
In this article I am going to call them “Action Roguelikes” because that is the tag Steam provides us that most of these games end up using. I actually don’t care enough to argue what name is correct so don’t bother yelling at me. Whatever you think it should be, you are right, I agree with you.
A few weeks after Splattercat’s video I wrote a blog post about how this type of game could be a perfect
“first game” that could actually earn you money. Here is that blog post…
A couple developers took the initiative and actually released a game inspired by Vampire Survivors and they made some serious money from it. See my post on how 20 Minutes Till Dawn earned half-a-million dollars in its first week.
Other games in this sub genre that did quite well:
Despite taking only a few months to create these games, the developers earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Steam-playing-public couldn’t get enough of them. Although not every game that was inspired by Vampire Survivors became a hit, enough did that it proved to be a genre that was lower risk.
But is the trend done?
Is the party over?
There is a funny thing that Indie game developers do anytime there is the tiniest bit of good news for them, they almost instantly say “Well it was good, but it is probably over by now and things will be worse.”
Rather than have a knee jerk negative reaction that assumes the worst, let’s sanely dig through the numbers and determine if Action Roguelikes (aka Vampire Survivor style games) are still popular enough that it makes sense to make one.
To solve this mystery, I used Video Game Insights to find all Action Roguelikes that were released in 2022.
To filter down to only Vampire-Survivor likes I I used the tag combination “Action Roguelike” and “Bullet Hell.” Action Roguelike tag by itself also includes games like Dead Cells.
In all the graphs below I filtered out the games that got fewer than 100 reviews because their player numbers didn’t really impact the graphs I drew.
I then used Steam.db to download the daily number of concurrent users for each of the games and plotted them together. Concurrent users is a good measure because it shows how many people are actively playing the game. If we just went off reviews we can’t tell if someone bought it and never played it again. Also we want to see if Steam players are still engaging with the genre.
So here is the total number of Action Roguelike Players every day since the genre took off in January 2022:
As you can see, there was a considerable dip in September but then the number of players rocketed up and has reached a new plateau that has been quite steady from October through today.
But what about non-Vampire Survivors
Yes Vampire Survivors itself is very popular but what about other games? Are players willing to play a game other than the one that started the whole thing? Here are the number of concurrent players shown on a single graph.
Based on the graph, you can see since October of this year other games have become much more popular. In fact, if you look at a few weeks after October, Brotato and Soulstone Survivors were actually played more than Vampire Survivors.
Even games like Rogue: Genesia and 20 Minutes Till Dawn made a good showing.
But maybe you think the October boost is because Vampire Survivors left Early Access in October and then released another big DLC in December. I thought that too, so I created the following graph which is the number of players for every Action Roguelike that is NOT Vampire Survivors.
If we look at this cumulative active players graph again you will see there is a big saddle in the middle from July to October, what is that?
By July people were playing less and less Vampire Survivors, but by October, those really high quality Action Roguelikes appeared like Brotato and Soulstone Survivors. Vampire Survivors also went 1.0 and that combination showed that people were still interested in the genre, they just needed new content to play.
But None of those games came close to beating Vampire Survivors, the party is over!
Vampire Survivors has first-movers-advantage. There will probably never be another game that will have more players than it. But, indie games are not winner take all. Just because you are not the #1 game in the genre does not mean you don’t make money.
Let’s look at this little tiny green bump of a game here. That game is Nomad Survival
It is the 8th most played game in my survey.
I reached out to the developer of Nomad Survivors to see how much money you make being the 8th most popular Action Roguelike. and he was kind enough to share his numbers:
Nomad Survival grossed over $221,000 dollars!
For a small game made by a single developer, to net out $196,000 in 6-months is a very good return.
So just because you aren’t the best doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.
There are too many Action Rogue Likes
One of the biggest arguments against making another Action Rogulikes is that there have been too many released. So I checked. In 2022 there were 174 games that were tagged Action Roguelike + Bullet Hell.
I compared those 174 to a bunch of other genres indies typically make:
174 Action Roguelikes released in less than a year is a lot, but it isn’t anywhere near the number of Puzzle Platformers or Visual Novels released last year. Combined, those two genres can be counted in the thousands. When has an indie decided to stop making a Puzzle Platformer because of oversaturation? So why should indies be afraid with Action Roguelikes?
| Genre | Games released in 2022 |
| Visual Novel | 1341 |
| Puzzle Platformer | 740 |
| City Builders | 278 |
| Metroidvania | 219 |
| Action Roguelike + Bullet Hell | 174 |
| Sokoban | 120 |
| 4X | 68 |
| Rogulike Deckbuilder | 58 |
| Social Deduction | 26 |
Summary
As I wrote in my original blog post last year, Action Roguelikes are an amazing opportunity for indie game developers. Here is why
- The game is fairly simple and doesn’t require a huge amount of content.
- The genre is so new that genre conventions haven’t ossified and there is room for innovation.
- The fanbase is still ravenous for it.
- The simple core interaction (run-around-and-dodge-enemies) means that you can usually repurpose an in-progress game or abandoned game, and turn it into an Action Roguelike. That is actually what Soulstone Survivors did, the rebuilt their in progress game Rogue Soulstone to fit the genre.
The upgrade, recombinant powerup structure, upgrade trees are very common in other games so after you complete your Action Roguelike you can repurpose that code for another game.
Since the genre is over a year old now, I do think you need to have a higher quality graphics and presentation than if you launched in June. You also need to have a stronger and more defined hook to stand out. You should also study the genre, play a lot of Action Roguelikes, and read reviews about what players liked and didn’t. Making a new take on an existing genre typically means you can only change 20%-30% before it is unrecognizable as a variation on the core genre.
Making a game even in a hot genre is still risky. But the good news is if the game “fails” you only spent a few months making and marketing it. Even if you didn’t make a lot, you still practiced delivering, marketing, and launching a game which can be a huge skill boost to your next game.