Every couple of years or so, the brightest minds of the gaming industry invent a new label, a new version or even a whole new genre to create the next big obsession for gamers. Think about it – Soulslikes, Roguelikes, Metroidvanias – DOOM clones, anyone? This goes back a while, because obviously trends like being followed.
Sometimes a single game hits so hard with the community that its design DNA starts spreading faster than the flood in Halo. But seriously, how long can we go before we’re running out of “xyz-likes”? Think about it, how many devs do you know that personally borrowed, refined, redefined, and sometimes completely reinvented every core design loop in video games you can think of?
Be it battle royales, the more recent rise – and subsequent fatigue – of extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown, or even the mainstreaming of previously niche genres like deckbuilders and survival sims: We’ve seen it all, and a little bit like there’s no melody left in music to explore, gaming is bound to be running out of design choices to alter, right?
Well…that’s the big question, what’s next? If history is any reliable indicator (and it tends to be), the next big hype isn’t going to be from Ubisoft or EA, since they’re playing it way too close to the chest in the last, oh, two decades. We bet it will come from a weirdly brilliant idea that players didn’t know they needed and we definitely didn’t expect. Which brings us to the point of this article – let’s break down where we’ve been, where we are currently, and most excitingly, what obscure trend will take over the gaming industry next.
The Age of the “xyz-Likes”
We know, history lessons aren’t always fun, but it started in the year 1993 for us – you knew this would come, but DOOM hit the screens back in that fateful year, and it spawned a whole lot of imitators – some more direct, some just borrowed a few core principles. This was the birth of the DOOM clones, and be it Hexen, or the whole host of Build Engine games, they all had a very similar core loop.
Games like DOOM, Dark Souls and Metroid/Castlevania for that matter didn’t know they would create whole subgenres, but they were just so good at what they did that every developer and their aunt took notes – it is a business, after all. Suddenly, the term soulsike/metroidvania was coined, and these terms all stood for a certain gameplay loop, too similar to the OG game to ignore. Soulslike meant punishing but (arguably) fair combat, environmental storytelling taking the place of cinematic cutscenes, and intricate level design.
Metroidvania? An action platformer, with a huge interconnected map, which is procedurally unlocked by gaining new abilities, mostly in 2D, by the way. Roguelike? You get the drill, high stakes runs, meta-progression and a reset of enemies whenever you inevitably kick the bucket, since difficulty is also a factor here. So you see, all these games started off with one game, creating a subgenre of other games trying to follow into their (mostly successful) footsteps.
But what about the next step? Well, Indie studios were unable to compete with the ever-growing budgets of AAA productions, so they needed to find more creative solutions to mix up the formula. This birthed a renaissance of hybrid genres, which, granted, might not be the most inventive thing to do, but that’s precisely what happened.
Dead Cells for example mixed a roguelike structure with the progression of Metroidvania’s, and Hades did the same thing, but in perfection – and with an actual narrative, which previous roguelikes had notorious difficulty with. The industry took that concept, and wouldn’t you know, everything is a “something-like” nowadays, so scrolling through Steam is impossible without the odd soulslike shooter, roguelike farming sim or even, God forbid, Metroidvania deckbuilders.
The Post Battle Royale Burnout vs. Extraction Shooter Fatigue
Naturally, the most dominant gaming genre of the 90s being shooters (alongside CRPGs and strategy games, of course), the formula had to evolve there too. The 2010s were dominated by the military shooter, made popular by Call of Duty and, to a certain extent, Medal of Honor – what came next?
Battle Royale, of course. Fortnite was a huge hit, and suddenly every multiplayer shooter under the sun either added a BR mode, or was developed as a battle royale game outright – you know, shrinking maps, lots of loot, and the old king of the hill gameplay. The loop was perfect to combine with live service attributes and spawned a lot of copycats, some more, some less popular.
Enter the extraction shooter, we’re now in the year of 2020, and the popularity of Escape from Tarkov shot through the roof. Hunt: Showdown, and more niche games like Dark and Darker twisted the formula and became cult-classics in their own right, but the loop of fighting to make it out alive, while carrying all the valuable loot you could risk losing forever upon death was just as potent as the king of the hill formula.
The tension was the reward, and no match was ever the same – every match felt like a gamble, a tiny story in itself. Guess what happened? Even big hitters like Call of Duty exploited that trend by creating DMZ, and new IPs like The Finals and ARC Raiders took their lessons from the forefathers of the extraction shooter genre, in order to create something unique. Here’s the catch, however: This genre is darn hard to get absolutely right. Risk vs. reward balance and managing player frustrations plus the huge learning curve is a nightmare. See where we’re going with this? Let’s make a prediction or two.
What’s the Next Big Thing in Gaming?
Ironically, the next big genre might not be about gameplay mechanics at all, as much as that used to be the trend – it might just be about community. Games like Helldivers 2, Palworld, and No Man’s Sky have proven that social experiences built around cooperation (or chaos, let’s not forget the chaos) can capture players for months on end, without a unique gameplay loop or live service component to their name. But they also hint at a future where players drive the narrative together in shared worlds, don’t you think?
Think of the insane amount of community driven Minecraft servers, GTA RP, or Sea of Thieves – games where the systems are simple, but the stories come from the people playing them. That digital stage idea, where developers provide the tools and players provide the drama, is becoming increasingly powerful, and we can see why.
We’re already seeing studios like Rockstar, Bethesda, and Hello Games lean into community-driven design. Combine that with improved modding tools and cross-platform accessibility, and we might see the rise of what you could call the Storylike, perhaps? Not a single-player experience per se, not a competitive arena, but a living, evolving narrative built by the crowd. If we had to give the next wave a name, it might even be the Immersivelike – games focused less on killing things and more on existing in worlds that feel reactive, intelligent, and deeply personal.
We’re already seeing hints of it in Starfield’s mod scene, V Rising’s systems, Baldur’s Gate 3’s social storytelling, and Project Zomboid’s survival simulation, if we had to name a few. Because after a decade of grind-heavy, battle-pass-laden live-service noise, players seem ready for something else, and the feeling is palpable. Imagine a game that makes us as a community feel like we belong somewhere again. And maybe that’s what the next “-like” will really be – not a set of mechanics, but a feeling. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but it sounds good to our ears.
