[armchairhacker]

There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.

The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.

[charcircuit]

Balatro did marketing and were extremely successful at it getting gigantic content creators to play their game.