Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice.
Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much.
Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.
Many games aren't fun, but many games are fun enough or are marketed well enough. You won't stand a chance without going above and beyond in one of the two executions.
I mean, why do people want to write buggy software? It's not on purpose, they're just not good enough to deliver quality in a timely fashion.
My experience with most indie games cannot deliver on a core gameplay loop that's satisfying, even when that loop is not the draw of the game in which case I'd expect them to ape something competent.
IMO an example of a studio that doesn't mess this up is Giant Games. I've liked some titles more or less but the core gameplay loop has always been competently designed.
I'm criticizing the shallowness and lack of information in the comment. Everyone knows games should be fun. Saying "[the game] needs to be fun" has literally 0 bits of information and is a lazy explanation for why games don't succeed.
art has to risk failure or it’s not art. perhaps has to even be near certain to fail.
no one should be depending on art to feed their family.
no one should be making art for any reason other than love.
art must be beautiful.
as many have pointed out, blockbuster movies and triple a games are interesting, but they are not art.
So "the game isn't fun" needs a lot more context on who is saying it, and is useless otherwise. Do they like your genre? Are they miscommunicating what sounds like a game design issue when it could be an art/sound issue? Did they just grab your game in a bundle/gamepass and weren't really in the mood to play your game?
It's all speculation. And it's probably better to find better feedback than try to psycho-analyze every comment that way.
Cognitive dissonance and inertia, among other reasons. When asked if the game (which this topic is about) was fun, the author beat around the bush. Even the positive reviews on Steam make it clear people didn't often really want to play the game more than once. The top review on Steam [1] is some guy talking about, "Had a LONG night of playing this yesterday with my mates..." with less than 2 hours played, lifetime.
The developer clearly knew, deep down, that the game wasn't really fun, but he convinced himself it was. And that's really really easy to do. This is one of the few things the mega-studios get right. They're more than happy to cancel big games they've already sunk millions into if they're just not working out right. As an indie developer you either have to have some crazy degree of introspection, or a few friends who understand that absolutely tearing down what you've spent thousands of hours on is the biggest favor they could ever do for you.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/342920/Toto_Temple_Deluxe...
I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth"
As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here.
Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?
"build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable.
If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.