I don't follow Steam roguelikes much. Freeware roguelikes tend to be of a higher quality than those for sale, so why bother?
They don't seem like much of a authority on this then in my opinion. How they define things over there says more about them than the genre.
If they put the term "roguelike" on something to help it sell, that action or it's social consequences don't really matter as to which definition is appropriate.
I think of this game as a rougelike regardless of all that, and I'll try my best to put this to words.
When I think about what a roguelike really is, or if I should consider something a roguelike or not, I usually go back to the spirit in which the original Rogue was created.
From what I remember the story goes that the developers used to play a text adventure game on their college computers, but once they beat the game it was not so fun to replay.
Because of this they got the idea for Rogue, an adventure game that would have a different dungeon each time you go through it, so that it is not as repetitive.
So when I think of a roguelike, I think of a game where the developers are trying to increase replayability in the same way the developers of Rogue did, intentionally or not.
From what I've seen, the developer was attempting to create a more replayable FPS in the same way the developers of Rogue wanted to create a more replayable adventure game.
That would be primarily through randomized dungeon layouts in order to produce a challenge you can not very easily circumvent with prior knowledge from another playthrough.
As for exclusivity, that would still exclude games where the randomization is not applicable to a kind of dungeon, which would mean no puzzle, survival, or simulation games.
If there is a randomized "dungeon" in the game, but it is not the central aspect of the game, I think of that as a roguelike minigame. Like a shooting minigame, a driving minigame, a platforming minigame, etc.
So if one of those games you mentioned is mostly static, but for a few randomized dungeons, that is what I think is the best way to define what is going on. Like I think Cataclysm is primarily a survival game with roguelike minigames throughout.
But in this game, the dungeon is what the entire thing is designed around, so it seems incorrect to pass it off as being just a shooter with a "roguelike element" to it. It is as much a roguelike as a shooter in my opinion.
>traditional roguelike
Actually I've always used this definition when thinking about the kind of "by the books" development of a roguelike you usually see around here.
This is the kind of roguelike which tends to become popular here, while nontraditional roguelikes are what is popular on steam and places with a similar audience.
There are some games spiritually closer to Rogue and some farther, but I don't think that it is a matter of what is marketable or what a community is interested in seeing more of.
I think it is more about what the developer was trying to do, rather than what their audience wants to be true.
