[at_]

I don't know. This was an interesting read for me because I recently had an experience that was largely the opposite.

I made a game using free time after work that ended up being featured on most of the big mobile gaming sites, as well as within the App Store itself (on the top banner of the Games bit). It didn't make lifechanging amount of money by any stretch (per hour I think would have just about broken minimum wage by now), but a decent amount considering it was something I was doing for fun. The experience has made me very excited to a) continue to update this one and b) get started on my next game project, which I think has the potential to reach more people. Or at the very least, turn out to be more interesting.

If starting from nothing I think it's all down to either having a snappy and unique concept, and/or a snappy and unique visual style. The best bit is that neither of these things necessarily require lots of time to pull off, just luck (or whatever it is). I have no industry connections whatsoever and zero ad budget, but if you do something that hasn't quite been seen before, and that people/sites will have fun writing/talking about, it can get you a foot in the door. Maybe I'm being too optimistic and underestimating how lucky I got!

[DetroitThrow]

I think your postmortem would be more interesting to read about than ops, frankly. It reads like the writer not only was expecting a larger degree of success for a not-so-interesting and expensive-to-make game, it also seems like he never found a group of people which enjoyed playing it.

In your case, it sounds like you would've been fine without external validation, invested not a huge amount of money into the project, and we're focused primarily on fun.