ROGUELIKE vs METROIDVANIA
32One 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.
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.