The market is so saturated that lots of good games have a hard time even getting noticed. Just making a good game doesn't automatically mean success.
There are definitely a lot of consumers who will gladly pay $20 for Silksong because of the hype and pedigree surrounding it, but would never take a chance spending that much on a game that hasn't had that kind of hype train surrounding it. Which does make sense, without the hype train you don't know if a more obscure indie may or may not be worth the $20. But then that tells us that it's the hype train that matters here, not just whether or not the game is good.
scintilla@crust.piefed.social 3 weeks ago
You basically have to be a developer and marketer to have even a chance of success in the current market and even then you could be the beat at both and simply not have the luck to go viral and only get a few hundred sales. So much of indie game selling is creating things that can go viral now hence the absolute proliferation of "freind slop" games because it's so easy for moments between two popular funny content creators to go viral.
Deyis@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
This is why I keep asking people how to find good indie games which have flown under the radar because they haven’t gone viral but it genuinely feels like the people who seemingly do this regularly are either gatekeeping how they find them or are just full of shit.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
There are a few good YouTube channels that regularly show great indie games I otherwise never would have heard of. One I can think of off the top of my head is splattercatgaming