[gwd]

I took "I can see a good reason why it failed" to mean, "There was an obvious flaw in the craftsmanship of the game": The story wasn't good (if it relied on story), the mechanics weren't good, the graphics were sloppy or ugly, it was buggy or incomplete or something else.

The claim is: Make a solid game - a solid story, solid mechanics, solid graphics, no bugs, etc., and the game will succeed.

And that's an easy claim to refute -- point out just one game that was at least "solid" on all those fronts which nonetheless failed. He's asking you to show him one, so that he can update his beliefs.

"They didn't spend $500k promoting it" doesn't seem like a "good reason why it failed".

[meheleventyone]

What I’d suggest is taking a look through the games published by a company like Raw Fury that has a stellar reputation. There are plenty of good games by that definition that didn’t do well commercially on their books.

https://rawfury.com/

For one other example I know of because friends made it is Phantom Spark: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924180/Phantom_Spark/

Making a good game is table stakes for success not a guarantee.

[Buttons840]

I picked a random Raw Fury game, Regions of Ruin. It looks like a Viking side-scroller, fighter, builder game. The art is pretty good, but amateurish. Overall, a pretty good game, though it would probably never catch my eye. I looked up the stats: it once had 3000 players at once, and has about 2000 good reviews. A game stats site estimated it had about $400,000 in sales. I consider this a success.

I should clarify that by "success" I mean the game had a good amount of attention and enough sales to potentially make a profit. This is what I care about as a potential game developer. Does the market still give decent games a decent shot at being profitable? Regions of Ruin is a decent game and had a decent shot at being profitable.

I looked at Phantom Spark. It's a simple F-Zero style racer through nice looking 3D stages. It's fairly minimal, only one type of racing vehicle with some color variations. The main draw of the game is improving your time trial times. There's some characters that put text on the screen, but their style doesn't really fit the game. Overall, the characters don't appear to contribute to a story or anything. I'm guessing there's maybe like a dozen tracks? This game was reviewed by several gaming sites, including IGN and received decent scores. One website estimated it made $80,000 in revenue.

Everyone will have to judge for themselves whether or not those two games had a shot at success. Judge for yourself the state of the gaming market.

[meheleventyone]

For context since success is slippery I’d take it as able to recoup development costs and provide a runway for the next project otherwise being a professional game developer could not be sustainable. This is also the worst place to be in as a developer where each project has to recoup it’s very precarious.

Both are rated Very Positive on Steam so clearly both are good games in the opinion of the gaming population at large.

The thesis that all you need to find success is a good game is clearly not sufficient.

FWIW I think Regions of Ruin was most definitely a commercial success and that estimated revenue figure is probably very low for the review count they have.