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Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

You're describing survivorship bias. It's impossible for you to know about the great games that you haven't heard about. I'd suggest listening to the devs on this one. I can attest that 'the cream rises to the top' isn't remotely true in areas I know more about - short stories, movies, music. There is indeed lots of cream (in addition to lots more crap with money behind it) at the top. there's also lots of cream, vast gallons to stretch the metaphor, sinking always. Especially now perhaps, in our era of vastly greater content production and a well established arms race of advertising and marketing.

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Which great games are pulling less than 1k steam sales? Or have just a handful of reviews? I've found some games I like with very low review count, but they're all clunky and whimsical, or extremely short, or can't be played without pestering the people you live with, or shoot themselves in the foot in other ways.

At some point the needle to hay ratio becomes untenable and searching the whole haystack is no longer possible for a single person. You can still randomly sample the stack, though, and rely on the opinions of others to find what you personally missed, and good games with mass appeal do tend to rise a little bit from random players stumbling across them; maybe not to blockbuster status or even profitability, but enough that a game with a marketing budget should get more than 21 Steam reviews if it's genuinely appealing. There's really not a lot of cream at the very bottom.

Why are 'you' (in the general sense, you're far from the only one doing this) implying this is an incomplete information game? Steam has absolutely excellent tools for content discovery, and the vast majority of people use them actively. And due to the effectively perpetual nature not only of Steam, but also even of console stores now a days - there really is no 'survivorship.' There are games released [literally] 30 years ago now being discovered by new users, and making new sales.

And that isn't just some sort of academic point I'm making. Seemingly the overwhelming majority of indie success stories are achieving long-tail success now a days. Increasing numbers of indie games released like a decade ago are having better play figures today than they did at launch. This includes both the extremely well known titles like Terraria [1], as well as those that are still relatively unknown like Kenshi [2].

[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/105600

[2] - https://steamcharts.com/app/233860

Can you point to some great movies that didn't see any success this year?

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