You have defined it to mean "high brow"
Both in
- "high brow"
- niche genres
categories (which I both gave as examples) you will likely find quite some games that that are excellent, but won't make a lot of money. But don't pick too much on these categories since my central point is "Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game".
And no those games are far from excellent, I play a lot of such niche games but they all suck quality wise compared to mainstream games with similar sales, I play them for new experiences but I never expect quality from them. So it is much easier to sell well enough to maintain an indie team by making niche games than by making mainstream games since the competition for niche markets is so much smaller.
Maybe you think that "100k" copies is a failure since it didn't sell millions, I have seen people thinking along those lines. But no, 100k copies is a massive success, even 10k copies is more than enough for a 1 person indie game, so those "indie gems" hardly failed at all.
I understand your point, but I hope people are seeing the irony of making such arguments under a post detaliing how the median game on steam can barely pay rent.
I don't think even if you filtered that data for "overwhelmingly positive games" that it'll suddenly average $500k+ revenue.
>Maybe you think that "100k" copies is a failure since it didn't sell millions, I have seen people thinking along those lines. But no, 100k copies is a massive success, even 10k copies is more than enough for a 1 person indie game, so those "indie gems" hardly failed at all.
really depends on team size. 100k is good, but divided among a team of 10 and after steam cuts, a $5 game is getting roughly 35k for a dev. You know, minmum wage in high COL areas. likewise for a solo game that made 10k sales.
My definition of success is as simple as "can the studio sustain itself from the sales of its games?". Maybe in a day where rent wasn't $3000+, but not these days in the US.
Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game; just compare "pop culture" (optimized to be commercially successful) vs "high-brow culture".
Even if you are not the "extremely high-brow taste" kind of person, there exist quite some video game genres in which excellent games are produced, but the audience of these games is a quite small (but sophisticated) niche audience, so that just by volume, games of these genres likely won't make a lot of money.