The money spent is tied in the mega-platforms like Steam, GOG etc. Getting any promo of any kind through these platforms, or being ranked high for a few hours, automatically propels the title in sales, regardless of the quality.
Count me a cynic at this stage but I have done my share of commercially released indie title, and for one man shows, it's a dry lake for dead fish.
Working hard, very hard, producing something means nothing. As a producer you have no rights. You are making something that exists in an absolute sea of similar hard work. A market where supply stunningly overwhelms demand.
This is to be expected. When I was 11 years old I was playing games, dreaming of being a programmer. I picked up a book and started learning. The next 6 years were mostly spent writing games. For reasons that won't shock you I didn't immediately think of writing a new spreadsheet program. The one exception was a program I wrote for school - and it failed.
People write games because it's fun writing a game. Because it's a good way to learn how to write code. Because one's immediate circle are impressed.
But the market for indie games is tiny. And every wannabee programmer is making them. Somewhere along the way you discover the laws of supply and demand.
You'll also discover that a business is one part product, one part support, three parts marketing. Marketing is waaaay more valuable, and important, than product.
Sure there are exceptions. There are stories of some random game with no marketing going viral. It happens. There are also stories of people winning the lottery. One of those is more likely.
The indie game market works completely as designed. Low startup costs. Accessible to anyone. A fun way to get into programming. A cool way to impress your friends. A fantastic hobby where you can have more fun in the process than the result.
Don't try and "fix it". It's not broken.
I’ve worked in advertising and I think that sounds broken.
Indie games are massively over supplied. Thus to get traction you need to be out-marketing (not necessarily out-spending) the other guy.
In one sense building the game is the easy part. Selling it is the hard part. It's a crowded market, and most games are, well, not great. It takes time, effort, and yes money, to market well, and get any kind of traction.
Arguably OS/2 was better than Windows 95, but MS spent a billion $ marketing it, and today OS/2 is a history footnote, if you've heard of it at all.
The more compeditive the market, the more marketing matters.
There's loads publisher that focus on some indie niche, and they will do the things that indie dev don't like / don't know how to do.
But indie dev don't like to hear their game sucks, because an indie dev put his heart and soul into production. So they stay well away from the well established publishing pathways
Blaming public taste is so much more comfortable.
I think the real issue is that most games are mostly just uninspired knock offs of other games. And this includes AAA games. And here marketing is absolutely critical, because your game may be fun but it doesn't really stand out on its own in any meaningful way. By contrast games that have distinct identities (and, critically, are also fun!) tend to have extremely long tailed success where word of mouth is vastly more important than marketing. An amusing example is Kenshi [1]. The guy went from tens of people playing his game while working as a security guard to make ends meet, to making millions from the game.
And I don't think those examples are particularly rare either, certainly nothing like winning the lottery. But coming up with an idea that's both unique and fun isn't easy.
If you are ready to hustle for marketing your game I disagree.
I have launched more small and medium games on Steam than most people, and if you are using the right strategy for the game you're launching you can make decent revenue even if the game sucks.
for example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/96100/Defy_Gravity_Extend...
You want a lot of people to buy the game quickly at launch. The best way to do that is building up wishlists prelaunch. That has organic second order effects that are helpful, but there are other ways to get lots of sales at launch...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/12/04/report-...
The market size of gamers with almost no money is endless.
What I didn't like is that they stuck around my steam library. What I wanted was to throw some quarters at a short-lived arcade experience. I didn't want my library polluted with shovelware.
But the answer is use an engine.
I used to both buy the rights and lease the rights to tons of small games though and then release them on steam. They were all made in an engine(unity, rpgmaker, xna, etc)
It is never faster to rebuild the wheel.
I don't need some 3rd party platform to sugar coat my creative experience. If it's good, it will ship of its own accord.
Pubg was made by an extremely well known modder with a huge following.
So many people have the mistaken impression that marketing doesn't matter. There is a reason companies like Google can make billions of dollars a year selling ads. It is because marketing is actually incredibly important.
This is like rocket fuel for me. Thank you.
So essentially, AA production values and a highly talented game designer who'd perfected the gameplay formula.
What made the game go viral was their marketing strategy - they were one of the first who bought Twitch streamers en masse, and paid a lot of money for that. In fact they triggered a gold rush of a sort with everyone doing it. This isn't to say that the gameplay wasn't good - it absolutely was. But the viral growth wasn't due to that, without marketing it would have been just like the other Greene's games, maybe a bit more popular, but surely not 3 million simultaneous players popular.
And before PUBG, he proved his design viable in the original ArmA Battle Royale mod, in the H1Z1 Battle Royale game mode, and in a myriad other games in which the devs suddenly added battle royale modes - in other words, on another platforms.
PUBG was iterative, it didn't happen overnight.
If they were actively sabotaging games, then sure, that's true. But most platforms have a vested interest in good recommendation systems. Think steam for you.
It's more the cruel and brutal reality of creative fields, only a very small number ever make it.