It's sad what happened to Roguelikes. Their creators aren't secretly ashamed of their origins, yet choose to create weird hybrids that do nothing but expose their games for how uninspired and lazy they are.

I don't really see the existence of action roguelites and roguelikes to be at odds with each other.

I've played Dungeon of Doom, angband, DCSS, and similar takes on Rogue. I was a fan of zangband and ToME 2. Those are pretty firmly in the traditional camp (well, ToME 2 has some static elements).

But...I also enjoy The Binding of Isaac, which I think is a pretty good action roguelite.

I don't...think that action roguelites existing harms roguelikes. You can like one or the other or both.

With this explanation of how proper Roguelikes fell out of public fashion, it's easier to understand why so few have been released since Beneath Apple Manor, the predecessor to Rogue, with only one usually being released every year and a huge six-year gap between 1995 and 2001.

I think that the author is upset at roguelites for roguelikes not getting a lot of releases, but...honestly, I think that the roguelike market is just a mature, fairly-well-satisfied market. I mean, a lot of video game development happens when technological development permits something new that in the past wasn't possible. When 3D hardware came out in the late 1990s, lots of developers started making 3D games that they couldn't make (or could only make in a limited form prior to having dedicated hardware). When storage capacity for games increased, lots more static data got used.

But roguelikes haven't, in their traditional form, really been technologically-constrained for a long time. The existing entrants are still pretty solid contenders, even if they're years old. It's hard to make a new roguelike that competes with a lot of the standbys. And especially because roguelikes are so replayable, a given player only needs so many roguelikes in their library to do a pretty good job of scratching the itch.

I mean, you can find newer stuff. I like Shattered Pixel Dungeon, for example; it's open-source, and if you want to support the dev, you can buy it on Steam. You can play it on desktop, but it's a variant well-adapted to the touchscreen; my take is that pretty much anyone with a smartphone should probably give it a shot, as it's probably my favorite open-source smartphone game. And the dev runs a Threadiverse community at pixeldungeon@lemmy.world.

But I think that it's unreasonable to expect a rate of development for a very mature genre to be comparable to younger genres. I think that it's unreasonable to blame action roguelites for a relatively-slow rate of new roguelikes.