[TillE]

If you make a game which can be cloned quickly, you've made something extremely simple. Don't do that.

Anyway, I would certainly not choose to develop mobile games, seems like a bad idea for many reasons. But look at PC games: you can make something as absolutely weird (and arguably 'unmarketable') as Disco Elysium, which needed no "lottery", it's simply a masterpiece.

[vlunkr]

I agree, when it comes to larger indie games. But there are still simple games that are worth playing, and certainly don't deserve to have their revenue stolen by content farms. The game referenced in the video above is an example of this. And people forget that 2048 was heavily "inspired" by Threes.

It's a separate discussion, but I believe there's still a "lottery" aspect to indie games. There's a lots of survivorship bias as play there. For every Hollow Knight or Disco Elysium, how many other passion projects run out of funding, or get released and go unnoticed?

[jlawson]

There's a huge infrastructure for game discovery - Dedicated subreddits with millions of subscribers, curators, massive infrastructure from companies like Valve (Steam) and Google to help discoverability, forums and discussion groups and Discords and Kickstarter...

People are hunting endlessly for good games. But cannot find them.

Even me! I'm a knowledgeable nerd with time, but I can't find anything worth playing. I know many people in the same situation.

There aren't really unknown gems. Great games don't go unnoticed. Many indie devs just like to think they do because they don't want to accept that their game just isn't very good.

Hollow Knight and Disco Elysium are great examples. These could never have gone unnoticed. These are professional efforts from teams of dedicated, very skilled developers, who did a lot of non-obvious things the right way. Nothing replaces a game like Disco Elysium especially. It was always going to get noticed. (I don't know HK as well but from what I've heard it is also exceptional at what it does.)

I'd be interested if you could name any unnoticed game that approaches either of these two in being compelling to play.