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Those passion projects exist you just haven't heard about them. Unfortunately , we're past the point where reach is free and organic. You now need to pay if you wanna be heard.

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> You now need to pay if you wanna be heard.

Citation needed. Plenty of games get picked up and become popular organically. How much did they spend on Minecraft's marketing? Fortnite? Factorio? KSP?

Most of your examples first popped up 10 or so years ago give or take, when organic reach was still possible. The only one that didn't was fortnite (Dec 2017) but it's a far cry from a small indie project, it came from a AAA developer that not only had multiple well known games, was also behind the unreal engine, one of the most popular game engines.

Define organic and payment. We still have successful indie games exploding in success, mostly on its quality. It's just that the threshold for "quality" is higher with more competition around. So not any little crappy project becomes automatically successful, nor does the hundred clone of something gains any attention just because it makes something different.

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