But yeah, the entry fee for that lottery is at a historic low, which is still great (especially for hobby devs who don't care about the rest!)
When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.
Sure, some streamer randomly picking up your game is beyond your control. But you can certainly create conditions that would make it easier for your game to be picked up by a streamer (build relationships with journos, streamers; get paid marketing, etc.)
Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.
I think that both for simple and complex games there are those that nobody cares about and those that end up really popular. Sometimes it's about good marketing, sometimes it's about making what people actually want to play (instead of what you want to make), sometimes it's about developing it really well, other times it's just about being at the right place at the right time.
Those aren't mutually exclusive qualities, for certain titles you might need lots of one of them, or maybe a mix of all of them. In regards to what you actually need, it can indeed be a lottery and thinking that hard work (or marketing) is all that's necessary in ample amounts (or even is a pre-requisite) might be misleading, because it's not the full story.
For an example of how any mix of those aspects can lead to failure, look at the launch of Brigador, a well made game that was a flop: https://youtu.be/qUsuusNLxik
Then contrast that (years of development) with something like Vampire Survivors. Or maybe 2048, or Flappy Bird, or Wordle for examples of even simpler projects that were also easier to make, that still were immensely popular and much more successful.
Not sucking isn't enough. Even being "Great" isn't enough. And even being "amazing" just isn't good enough to be successful. You need people to notice and care and help you and carry you to success. Mediocrity with a lot of public and positive reinforcement beats quiet greatness. Truly great things die every day from lack of attention and the willingness / motivation of others to help you carry that greatness forward. No greatness succeeds on its own, despite how great it might truly be.
Great point.
If every creator does marketing, then everyone is in the same position and nobody has control. Also, check out this research paper, published in Science, showing that popularity signals like the number of downloads and ordering by popularity increases the unpredictability of a music market, which is an opposite effect to what you expect. I suspect similar effects happen for game and other cultural markets:
Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5762), 854–856. https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....
I challenge anyone to provide a link to an actual great indie game that hasnt done well. that flew under radar.
The point I think people usually mean to make is that the odds are low (really, extremely low) so it's not really a prudent financial choice unless you have other ways to support yourself and don't care about potentially throwing away the time/effort if it doesn't work out.
Unfortunately I've seen so many people pour their hearts and souls into a game thinking they can just start marketing it when it's ready: You should be engaging with your future audience well before then.
You don't have to take money from them, you don't have to make empty promises, but in the current landscape you need people to be waiting for your game, not you waiting for players, because odds are they won't come.
For every lucky game that gets the right streamer there's 10 more that are truly great games that just never get traction and die.
Sounds to me like an opportunity. There may be a demand for a service that reviews indie games and "discovers" (promotes) little-known-but-great ones. It even has an obvious revenue source: allowing advertising by games (so long as advertisements and promoted works are VERY CLEARLY separated).
You need to basically be an app store but do it better than original.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/588210/HELLION/
Looks like it sold incredibly well and was abandoned by the developers and is no longer for sale.
A weird example.
Quality is necessary but not sufficient for success.
Also: a while back, I wanted to empirically test the "any good game will succeed on steam, and if it doesn't succeed, it isn't a good game" hypothesis by setting up a little metagame called "Steam Prophet". We would track upcoming steam games and try to predict which ones would succeed BEFORE they came out. We eventually disbanded the project when we got so reliably good (but not perfect) at predictions that we got bored and quit. Turns out that just a few leading metrics were incredibly predictive of day 1 (and thus day 30, day 60, and day 90, and year 1) success -- chiefly the number of followers the game had on Steam on launch day. It is a rare game indeed that can succeed on Steam without first having banked tons of high quality wishlists (of which followers is a public proxy metric for).
The spirit of Steam Prophet lives on today in the form of Simon Carless' Game Discover Co newsletter, which obsessively follows upcoming and newly released Steam Games: https://gamediscover.co/
Most good single player games do well.
Most developers have very little understanding of marketing, and are very hesitatnt to pay for good marketing services.
Here's something most people won't tell you: the majority of online marketing is paid, either explicitly (i.e. you pay Google) or covertly (i.e. you "bribe" an editor at Forbes to feature your article).
Aside from rare cases like Flappy Bird, and aside from the usual vagaries of commercial, technological and artistic projects. And aside from special challenges like the minimum playerbase size required for an online game like Among Us.
During development, developers could set up a Steam page, release one or two trailers as soon as possible (with mocked-up gameplay if necessary), and try to predict the audience's interest by the increase of followers/wishlists (compared to other games). In case of a lukewarm reception, they could decide to drop this game and start developing another one.
Did you write about the leading metrics and your insights somewhere, aside from this article, which seems to be from the beginning of your "Steam Prophet" project?
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/what-i-learned-playin...