Summary "...why some software projects find an audience and others don’t, with a focus on independent games."
Ok so let's focus on one small area where we've observed a vague semblance of a free market and then extrapolate that to the entire software industry and assume every other area works the same...
That's essentially the definition of survivorship bias.
It's quite ironic to choose the game industry as the proof for this particular conclusion when you consider that it's one of the very few areas of the software industry which doesn't lend itself to total monopolization. People like to play different games, they play for a while, then they want something new; it's difficult to monopolize the market with such novelty-seeking pattern of consumption. Unfortunately, most areas of software have very predictable consumption patterns (especially B2B) with ridiculous lock-in factors.
The only way some of the big software firms would lose their monopolies is if there is total societal collapse.