[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.