It feels like a natural consequence of playing a lot of indie games; there’s too many little gems you just don’t hear much about on release, or which you end up only learning about because they end up bundled with something else you were being patient about.
Though I’m not even sure how I’d apply this label to traditional roguelikes, given how many are free, and how many more seem to be in a permanent state of development/‘early access’ (Caves of Qud is hitting 1.0 in a month does break my go-to example there though).
There’s definitely an appeal with some of the better AA and ‘AAA’ games too beyond financial reasons though, given the tendency for bigger studios to launch titles full of bugs these days. (I loved Cyberpunk when I played it a couple of months after release – was lucky to not experience many bugs at all on PC – but it’s so much easier to widely recommend it since it hit 2.0.
Maybe more significantly, it’s a recent game with rave reviews that’s still making Larian money without the use of mtx and/or dlc.
Aside, kinda expecting a lot of garbage D&D games since the endlessly greedy Hasbro has seen how much money it can make them. Doubt they’ll do anything other than miss the forest for the trees in their execution of that, though.