[baobabKoodaa]

> If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke.

You're punching too high. Music is a passion for many people. Same as game dev. I would expect >95% of game devs to be perfectly happy if they can make a living creating indie games. Of course it's nice to make a hit that makes you tens of millions of dollars, but most game devs would be happy to make enough to pay themselves a salary to live on.

Now, if we're not looking to make a hit, but we're looking to make a living, there are a lot of composers out there who can consistently achieve that (e.g. beatmaking for rappers advertising on youtube and such).

> I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing.

I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example.

[ApolloFortyNine]

>I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing.

Among Us is a good example. It was out for over a year before it exploded.

It got found by streamers and that slowly spread in that space before even the biggest ones were playing. [1]

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/510218

[pjc50]

>> I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing.

> I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example.

Flappy Bird is a bizarre exception: it was a massive viral hit before it was voluntarily withdrawn by the developer feeling guilty over its success. It was then cloned a lot.

[baobabKoodaa]

The reason why I mentioned Flappy Bird is that it originally wasn't a massive viral hit. It was on the app store for like a year with basically no-one playing it. And then it became a viral hit. So it's a good example of how a good game with no marketing doesn't get picked up (until it gets lucky and eventually does get picked up; you can imagine a timeline where that never happens).

[kibbi]

I think that extreme outliers like Flappy Bird (which the developer developed over a couple of days and probably didn't expect any significant return) just muddle these discussions. They're irrelevant if you want to suss out what happens in the usual case.

[johnnyanmac]

I agree, but when talking with these "where the hidden gems" audience, any example I point out will be "an exception". it makes the entire conversation a bit tiring, no matter how much you research the market these kinds of people have their opiions set, with no skin in the game.

[baobabKoodaa]

The usual case of good games which fail commercially because of bad marketing? How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"? The reason I talked about Flappy Bird is that the game's late success proves that its early failure was due to bad marketing. If you only want to talk about games which never succeeded commercially, then I have no way of proving to you that any of those were "good" games.

[somenameforme]

> How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"?

Steam reviews are a great way. Lots of folks, including myself, try or tried to seek out these hidden gems on Steam. And Steam provides some great tools to try to find them. [1] It just turns out that there simply aren't many games at all with genuinely high reviews, but very low player numbers.

There's a whole bunch of great games in the ~200 reviews category with high reviews, but I'd generally consider that successful. The average game gets something like 60:1 sales:reviews, so 200 reviews is around 12,000 copies sold. You're not going to be getting rich off those numbers, but that's more than enough to live an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/0

[johnnyanmac]

>You're not going to be getting rich off those numbers, but that's more than enough to live an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world.

I guess you don't live in the US or Canada these days. Even if the game was $20, 12k copies sold is $168k raw revenue, after steam's cut. if you have 2 people working on it, you make above average revenue, for one year.

If you have 3 people working on the game, that is below median income for the US. And it gets worse for any assets you buy or contractors you need.

Even with 2 people, you have to remember that you don't get benefits from being a full time indie. so even 80k in this situation if it's a true 2 person team may not be so much much better off than flipping burgers with healthcare/dental built in. It's a rough economy right now.