We have seen an explosion of successful and fun uses of RNG in 2025, following an already warm reception to several RNG-centric games in 2024. Is that a good or a bad thing for 2026? Is there still hunger for exploring RNG or have we sort of hit the limits of what is reasonable?

I'm mostly looking at how we started to see players get really hyped in 2024 about games like Vampire Survivors and Balatro, which basically started the "gamble-like" or "scoreslop" or "points-go-up roguelike" or whatever you want to call the genre. Then in 2025 we have have seen a flooding of the market with RNG increasingly at the center, alongside mechanics to rig it.

What is also happening, towards the end of 2025, is that we started seeing reasonable success for comical takes on RNG like Rogue Light Deck Builder, Unfair Flips and Q-Up. Usually those are early signs of a genre being pretty saturated.

With Megabonk's release and after months of RNG-centric games, players seem to be starting to hint at being burnt out, not a lot, but enough to see people complain that they are tired about what are objectively well designed games. There seems to be an increasing feeling that well designed is not going to be an automatic win anymore and the more games come out and the longer people play them and build up some burn out, the harder it gets to win them over.

I'm wondering, for 2026, what should we expect or want to play? What should be the focus of development efforts?

Is the way for Indies to keep exploring wilder ways to use RNG, or maybe step back a bit, reset to a tamer, more tried and tested design like the ones from 2024? And at that point do you go even further back, do you go to Isaac instead of Balatro, maybe Isaac or Spelunky and move back from RNG as an interactable mechanic that players can directly control?

Is there a place to go with no RNG at all? Find new mechanics to exploit, Subnautica had success with it, Ultrakill is still going strong. Are people maybe hungrier for fully controlled designs than they would be for RNG?

Maybe we haven't seen the whole of RNG either, the subject is so broad hat we most likely did not. Maybe we're tired of RNG roguelikes, so we could look at RNG RPGs where Dwarf Fortress is still insanely popular, so is Baldur's Gate 3 for example. Are people hungry for other kinds of uses of RNG, where RNG is more permanent and closer to use in worldbuilding
and storytelling than it would be to gameplay?

These are open questions. I don't have a firm answer on what I want and most players don't seem to have a clear idea either. It's something that has been bothering me for a few weeks as someone who exists in both sides of the gaming industry but regardless of which hat I wear I can't answer any of those questions in a definitive way.

It's an interesting dilemma for others I talked to, both developers and players, and while nobody has a clear answer either, the presence of a dilemma has interesting implications on the existence for a desire for change even if nobody knows what that may be, leaving this post as an open-ended and largely unanswered question.