Rogue-Lite Self-Balancing?

Warning ☢️ Heavy Game Design post ahead. How about we talk about a game genre that essentially self balances itself? 😱

Rogue-lite mechanics are one of the few systems in game design that self-balance itself. Of course its not completely hands off, you still need to make sure that you are creating difficulty spikes, flow curve, etc. But it is much more forgiving than other genres, especially compared to its hard brother Roguelike. There, you loose everything ☠️ and the main focus is rewarding player skill above all. If you learned and know the game, it doesn’t matter if you always start from scratch. But Rogue-lites rewards you for every run that you do, giving you resources even if you fail, which makes that time meaningful, instead of zero progression you would get during a fail state in Roguelike 😭.

This makes the game much more accessible and much less skill demanding, as every time you fail your player power still increases, which will eventually trivialize the difficulty of that level that was stopping you 🛑. You basically brute force through it on Xth attempt with much higher Damage and Health numbers. This creates a very interesting dynamic, which is opposite to the usual difficulty curve, which increases over time. Here it actually decreases over time until you finally get to win the level and then the system resets as next content cluster starts with higher difficulty. This is the self balancing part, where every player will eventually overcome the difficulty regardless of his skill, just through failure. So no “Dark Souls style” frustration happens 😅

Its no coincidence that some of the top mobile games are Roguelites such as Archero 1-2, Survivor io, Capybara GO, pretty much Habby‘s whole portfolio is mainly Roguelite RPGs. Also tower defense modifications such as 111퍼센트‘s Lucky Defense or Doodle Magic/ Bang Bang Survivor, which are all big revenue hits 🤑. On PC Rogue-lites also constantly takes top places 🏆, with games such as Vampire Survivors, Hades, Balatro, Slay the Spire, etc. Even though the revenue is much smaller that their mobile counterparts, these games still make significant revenue, especially in the context of their relatively low production costs. I expect to see many more mobile hits going forward, utilizing this forgiving mechanic 😎.