Enough with the Cards: Why Krafton is Folding on the Roguelike Deck-Builder Trend

Every few years, the video game industry hitches its wagon to a new design trend and rides it straight into the dirt. We saw it with open-world survival sims, we saw it with battle royales, and right now, we are living through the endless, suffocating reign of the roguelike deck-builder. If it feels like every third indie game hitting Steam involves a grid of cards, a relic system, and a permadeath loop, that is because it practically is. According to a report by WN Hub , Victor Lee, the Director of Global Investment at Krafton, revealed that he was asked to fund approximately 250 deck-building roguelikes over the past year alone.

That is an staggering amount of pitches for a single, hyper-specific genre. Lee shared his fatigue during the Digital Dragons conference, highlighting a creative bottleneck where developers are essentially pitching "Balatro, just with different cards." While the staggering success of LocalThunk’s poker-themed phenomenon clearly ignited a gold rush, the investment executive is highly skeptical that the market can support a conveyor belt of copycats. With development pipelines taking years, there is no guarantee that players will still care about shuffling virtual decks by the time these funded projects actually cross the finish line.

The Trap of the Shorter Trend Cycle

Chasing trends is as old as game development itself, but the timeline for cashing in on a fad is shrinking fast. Lee notes that the industry's trend cycles are getting progressively shorter. When a breakout hit captures the public imagination, hundreds of studios pivot instantly, hoping to catch the tailwind. However, by the time a full production cycle wraps up, the audience has usually moved on to the next shiny object. It is a game of musical chairs where the investment costs keep rising, but the available seats are vanishing before the music even stops.

Where Risk Management Meets Real Innovation

This does not mean the genre is fundamentally broken, nor is Krafton completely slamming the door on small-scale experimentation. Lee clarified that if a studio is spending a minimal amount of money to rapidly push a low-risk project into the market to test the waters, that is a perfectly fine business strategy. The real issue is the lack of structural differentiation among the pitches landing on executive desks. When an entire ecosystem of creators tries to mitigate risk by copying an existing template, they inadvertently create a market surplus that dooms most of them to obscurity.

The Hidden Cost of Genre Saturation

Behind the Pitch Deck: What most surface-level industry reports miss is the sheer psychological exhaustion happening behind closed doors at major publishing houses. When a single executive is forced to sit through hundreds of variations of the exact same mechanical loop, it fundamentally alters how publishers assess creative risk. The deck-builder boom has created a paradox where a genre once celebrated for its lean, innovative design has become the safest, most uninspired default option for studios looking to secure a quick paycheck. This mechanical homogenization makes it incredibly difficult for genuinely unique ideas to stand out when they are buried under a mountain of identical slide decks.

This fatigue is not just an executive grievance; it reflects a broader structural shift in how indie games are funded and produced. Historically, the roguelike framework was embraced because it maximized replayability while minimizing asset costs, allowing small teams to compete with massive studios. However, as the market reaches a saturation point, the cost of player acquisition skyrockets. It is no longer enough to have tight mechanics and a clever gimmick. Publishers like Krafton are looking at the long-term viability of an intellectual property, and a game that borrows its entire identity from a competitor rarely possesses the legs to sustain a franchise.

The situation mirrors the early days of the mobile gaming gold rush or the brief, chaotic life cycle of the auto-battler genre. Industry veterans remember when every studio scrambled to build their own version of Dota Auto Chess, only for the entire market segment to consolidate around two or three dominant titles within a year. By looking critically at the current deluge of card games, investment leaders are trying to prevent a repeat of that exact same market collapse, signaling to the development community that the window for low-effort trend-riding has officially closed.

The Paradox of Safe Bets in a Volatile Market

Reading Between the Lines: There is a profound irony in a massive publisher like Krafton—a company whose global empire was largely built on the back of PUBG, a game that rode the battle royale trend to unprecedented heights—bemoaning the lack of originality in the indie space. Publishers frequently urge developers to take massive creative risks, yet their internal greenlight processes almost always favor the familiar. By evaluating pitches based on existing market anomalies like Balatro or Slay the Spire, the investment ecosystem itself creates the very loop of imitation that executives later complain about. You cannot demand radical innovation while using a checklist built entirely from yesterday's hits.

Furthermore, this skepticism toward the deck-building genre overlooks why developers flock to it in the first place. In an era marked by brutal industry layoffs and skyrocketing AAA budgets, a card-based roguelike represents financial survival for a small studio. These games are relatively cheap to produce, easy to patch, and possess a predictable scope. Expecting a five-person team to pitch a groundbreaking, genre-defying masterpiece just to entertain a jaded investment board ignores the reality of keeping the lights on. For many creators, iterating on a proven formula is not a lack of imagination, but a calculated defense mechanism against absolute financial ruin.

Ultimately, Krafton’s public pushback will likely trigger a chilling effect across the mid-tier publishing landscape, forcing a rapid pivot to whatever mechanic emerges next. If history is any indication, the industry will not actually learn to value original design; it will simply find a new template to copy until that, too, becomes unbearable. The real casualty here is not the deck-builder itself, but the funding pipeline for experimental gameplay, which continues to shrink as publishers chase the impossible dream of a guaranteed, low-risk blockbuster.

"In the video game industry, originality is highly prized right up until the moment it comes time to sign the check, at which point everyone would prefer it if your revolutionary new idea looked exactly like something that already made fifty million dollars."

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn