[BigglesB]

> Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games.

I would disagree with this, you can absolutely buy your way to the front page of Steam if you know what you’re doing. On Steam, everyone’s front page is different so it’s perhaps not as obvious as hitting the front page of HN though and it’s in the interests of Steam & most successful indies to paint a narrative of purely organic growth leading to great success.

You don’t necessarily have to have an “exceptional game” but you do need to know your audience, what they like & how to reach them. Even then, once you’ve got that stuff down, you don’t just build it & hope they’ll come via the Steam algorithm. That’ll only really help you once you’re over a certain tipping point & it’s getting to that tipping point where the judicial use of a sensible marketing budget will make all the difference.

Bringing it back to the points raised in the article, it’s very much the believe that “all you need to do is make an exceptional game” that causes indie developers to sink years into a single make-or-break game which almost certainly won’t recoup its development costs.