> There’s a large community of players who strongly disagree with you.
A game doesn’t have to be large or have much gameplay depth for people to sink a lot of time into them or to play them at a very highly skilled level. There are people who sink hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of hours into all sorts of games, including modern shooters which I’m sure you agree are often quite lacking in depth. The videos you showed didn’t show depth in the game, they showed very skilled players who clearly played a lot. I’ll give you an example: does flipping a coin have depth to it? Because given enough practice, I bet I could flip a coin in a way that it will always come up heads.
> Today, there’s just so much competition
The examples you’re giving are on mobile, which is a cesspool of remakes, clones and garbage copies. Of course, so is Steam. The “strike it big” examples you’ve given are also on mobile, where games that can idly occupy someones time while they commute or whatever do well. Outside of mobile, there exist successful indie games that are more sophisticated games that made it big. But you’re right, for every great innovative game, there are 10x trash games that made it, but most of them are on mobile. I don’t know of any examples on PC or console (aside from big budget AAA games) that are like Flappy Bird or whatever and did really well. Instead you see games like Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Spacechem, World of Goo, Spelunky, Terreria, Bastion, FTL, Super Meat Boy, Rim World, Prison Architect and Braid.
Factorio's roots are in Transport Tycoon (1994). In fact, the OTTD (open-source clone of Transport Tycoon) rail-signaling methodology was blatantly "borrowed" by the Factorio Devs (And the Factorio devs are quite open and honest about this! There's nothing wrong about being inspired by earlier games, especially since Factorio adds so much gameplay on top of the core loop).
Coal -> Power Plant -> Electricity, as well as Iron Ore -> Steel were originally Transport Tycoon concepts as well. Factorio added many more items, but the "core items" of the game are clearly based on Transport Tycoon.
Transport Tycoon was first published in 1994. One can very easily call Factorio a high-performance, modern "Transport Tycoon" game, with aliens and guns added. The core element of collecting resources, loading them into packages to be delivered across the map, and growing a transportation empire is... well... Factorio in a nutshell. The vast, vast majority of player thought goes into moving items around in Factorio, just like the game it was based on.
Granted, Factorio has a LOT of additional details. But its gameplay roots are very, very clear. The devs really took the old formula and crafted something new out of it. In any case, its old-school because its roots are clearly inspired from games in the 90s.
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If you like Factorio, I highly suggest you play Chris Sawyer's simulation games: Rollercoaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon (or at least, OTTD, open source clone of Transport Tycoon).
I feel like Factorio is a continuation upon Chris Sawyer's obsession over detail, even if its done by a different dev. The original games have aged quite well IMO.
> but in my opinion Tetris had neither (doesn’t stop it from being fun though!)
There's a large community of players who strongly disagree with you. When you see what players have learned to do to take advantage of the RNG to score the most points in a 150-line Marathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F90TIwPLPyw
Here's another player who can do it, although not quite as long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umNTGq9p0qQ
Well... the game is deep. Not a lot of players can do the BT-Cannon Triple-TSpin Double-TSpin perfect clear loop. Then you've got players who focus on 4w center wells, then some players focus entirely on 9:1 sprints, while others focus on 7:3 splits instead.
Most players aren't trying to break the high-score lists against experts. But if you're an expert-player trying to prove yourself in the Tetris community, you'll have to pull out crazy tricks to keep up with everyone else's gameplans.
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> I’m not sure I understand what the point you’re trying to make re: “indies don’t usually have huge hopes to hit it big”. Can you explain a little more?
Today, there's just so much competition in the game development space. Something like 10,000+ games are released to Apple or Android app stores each MONTH.
The games which happen to "strike it big" and become huge successes aren't usually the games that invented a new style of gameplay either. Flappy Bird and Threes vs 2048 are the examples I give of this.
Flappy Bird is a shallow clone of the Newgrounds Helicopter game. While 2048 became the huge success on iOS despite being a blatant rip-off of Threes.
For every game like Factorio (which is certainly an excellent game), there are 10x examples of relatively poor gameplay games which become big instead.