You can see a ton of polished, fun games that weren't successful by just skimming over lists of games on phones, Steam, or Nintendo Switch. I'm not going to bother linking any of them, since you're just going to nitpick and insult the work of random people you don't know, and it won't be a productive path of conversation.
That said, you can redefine your idea of "success" a little and make a comfortable living: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmwbYl6f11c
Sorry, but this is disingenuous. Valid criticism is not "insulting". Additionally I've already watched that video. That developer purposefully made an extremely niche product that only a fraction of people wanted and was able to make a living doing that.
Which... proves my point. His games don't have mass appeal at all, so they don't make money.
I've been through the Switch catalog. There is so much trash on there that it's unbelievable. In fact, most people will agree that these App Stores are chock full of garbage games. I get ads for garbage mobile games on my Instagram feed all the time.
Making a playable game and making a good game are two different things. Most games are simply not good games.
Edit: I'd argue that you can't give me a good example because they don't exist. If there was a game you truly loved that was an underrated gem, you'd be super quick to show it. And that's what I'm trying to say: this concept of a polished, good game that is inundated and skipped on by the sheer amount of volume of good games, in my view, simply doesn't exist.
> I haven’t found a single scenario where the game wasn’t unfinished, janky and/or just plain unfun.
You could easily find lots of problems even with hugely successful games like Vampire Survivors or Enter the Gungeon. I'm fully confident that given a random assortment of fun, polished, shipped games that didn't go viral, you'll be able to come up with a long list of complaints.
Flaws or not, Vampire Survivors and Enter the Gungeon found a market because they were fun games that had some redeeming qualities that wasn't widely available on the market at the time. Other examples: Project Zomboid, Shovel Knight, etc.
Edit: still waiting on ONE game. Just one. Feel free to edit your comment with a game that deserves more recognition.
Send me an e-mail and I'll just message you every game I come across that should have been a hit and wasn't, once you get tired of it you can block me
care to share a few of those on here?
What you're actually getting at here is a hypothesis that success for a game isn't contingent on circumstances, a variant on the "a truly good game, will sell" hypothesis.
Among Us is a very clear case study to the contrary; it's a clear example that success, even for "truly good games" -- IS contingent on circumstances. Being a good game -- whatever that means -- is necessary, but not sufficient.
Among US was released in 2018 and it was a flop. I know the development team, and before the game released they were ready to call it quits any day.
It wasn't until 2020 that a particular streamer picked it up and that, combined with the pandemic, vaulted it to mega success. If that hadn't happened, it would have been a flop to this day.
This was a multiplayer game, and so if at ANY POINT they had given up the ghost and just shut the servers down -- as they very well could have totally rationally done -- it would have never taken out, and if I were to have shown you Among Us as a game that was good but didn't succeed, I'm sure you'd pick it apart and say, well of course it wouldn't succeed, look how much it sucks.
Altho, actually going to check my assumptions.. I found that out of 200-ish randomly selected steam games. I could find about 5 that were singleplayer, genuinely unpopular and looked good in screenshots/descriptions. Out of those only 2 didn't review poor to middling, and 1 of those passed the subjective test of "Would I play this?".
(The game was rotatePDF: a corporate tale)
I'm sceptical of the assumption that "you can make a truly good game and there's a good chance that it won't sell at all" that can be found in online discussions. Instead, Ryan Clark's approach to consistently make profitable indie games seems very plausible to me.
So I would add a few caveats to the hypothesis that "a truly good game will sell", such as the importance of selecting a viable genre and ensuring that development costs are not overly high, but otherwise I still believe in it...
I have to say that although I agree with this example here, I've seen lots of examples of games that, for all intents and purposes, became successful simply because they were good. Games like Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Project Zomboid, Factorio, Hyper Light Drifter, etc. A lot of these games had insanely small budgets, horrible conditions and/or adversity and yet their creators persevered.
If you make a good product, you will eventually find a market for it. At least, that's my take. But I totally get the other perspective. There's definitely an element of survivorship bias here.
It also really depends how you define "successful". I've put out 3 mobile games in the last few years as a solo or mostly-solo game dev[1]. Each one has been game of the day on iOS and received other prominent featuring. From a critical and editorial standpoint my games were successful. From a "is this a sustainable career that supports me financially" standpoint, not so much.
[1] You can find my games at https://birdcartel.com Let me know if you think they fall into the unfun/janky bucket.
Mobile is much harder. I think that is one medium where I agree that the OP is right. Because the games tend to be simpler, the barrier of entry is reduced drastically, so it's much harder to have sucecss. Serious gamers won't play mobile game and casual gamers are fickle, so just making a "good game" on mobile doesn't apply. I think it's especially true for word games (I saw you made two).
Nonetheless, your games look cool! I don't think they're games I'd spend more than a couple of minutes on (much less spend money on), but who knows? I think you should keep making more. The last word/numbers game I spent money on was Threes, and that was only because I heard about how 2048 stole the concept from that game. Not sure if that context even helps.
Thanks for sharing and providing some concrete examples.
I’ve found a few people online say that they don’t understand why their game did really poorly even though it’s like X and does Y AND Z. So I ask them to show me their game. I haven’t found a single scenario where the game wasn’t unfinished, janky and/or just plain unfun.
I want to go against the grain here and say if you have a game idea, just make it. But don’t expect people to buy it if it sucks. Like with all good artists, you have to be conscious of whether the thing you’re making is a good product or not. I think the author of this article realized that eventually.