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.
> 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.