Unless you make some sort of lucky viral, now what you need is massive resources for marketing... as I continue with my startup this become more and more obvious, there is no decent success in the game industry without massive marketing, from AAA (Activision expends on its main games around 250 million in marketing budget only), to Indie (many small successful indie games had big marketing budgets, or had others with those budgets doing the marketing for them, successful indies either are close friends of other successful ones or are rich or are close to the media industry, for example was journalist or worked for CMP Media)
When we wanted to announce we phoned up journalists, made appointments. We flew to the US, we went to PAX (with no booth) and tried to approach journalists cold to give a demo on a laptop in the corner.
We got a bunch of small articles, and bugger all web traffic. I think on announcement day we got articles on most of the major internet gaming news sites, but we still only got like 7000 visits to our website. This was in 2010.
But we kept on going. We kept on banging the drum. We kept making announcements. We kept making trips to America to talk to journalists in person. We kept grinding up the popularity and by the time we were ready to go in to open beta in January this year, we were a notable enough thing that on that day we got a million visits.
It wasn't an instant success. We didn't spend money beyond travel expenses. We didn't have prior connections. It was just a cold, hard slog from nothing to something.
Back in the day, it was more a problem of resources than ability or ideas, because hardware was expensive, open source was less prevalent, etc, but now almost everyone has the resources so now you need to be creatively and mentally on top of your game to compete instead. Being persuasive and able to get your work seen is also more important than ever. Lots of great work gets produced that never breaks out.
All that said, when things become more about talent than resources, it reduces the privilege needed to make an impact, so it certainly has its plus points.