I will personally shout out Tactical Beach Wizards. Incredible writing, charming art style, easy to learn hard to master mechanics, loads of content for the price, it really is a gem of a game. All my homies hate Steve Clark!
Okay so I've watch some of the video and I'm annoyed by it. A problem in the video has been highlighted when it comes to indie games and that's genre favoritism.
Indie game development seems to have such a hard on for roguelikes, strategy and anything that is addicting with retro visuals. That to me throws a lot of red flags. He does show some other games from other genres, but the ratio is evident. A lot of the games don't really impress me that much and that's coming from someone who has already been spoiled with the best of what indie gaming had to offer in previous years.
That guy is also kindof annoying too. "I realllly want to play", "addicting" .etc
I'd say this is mostly due to budget constraints. Voice acting, music scores, high fidelity art, models, animations etc cost a ton of money. Making random generated boards / levels / dungeons with simple art and scalable gameplay is simply just more feasible.
Another aspect is the popularity of the game. We've seen a lot of saturation in genres over the years. A the peak of PUBG and Fortnite popularity, there were so many battle royale games coming out. Then we got extraction shooters, and so on.
Personally, I love roguelikes and how we got to the point of mixing it with other genres (Balatro, Dungeon Clawler), but I can see your point. I feel the same about 2D (pixel art) platformers: I feel like I've seen it all already and nothing can excite me anymore.
I've been pretty vocal about my annoyance with the roguelike genre. I even have the tag blocked on Steam so they're never recommended to me - my hope is that Steam shares metrics on tag-blocking statistics.
But, I would guess there are enough fans of them to keep being made.
This has been true for a decade now.
It was true in the 90s too.
