[kibbi]

Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief.

Secondly, these sorts of discussions usually don't define any concrete amount of success that a game is supposed to achieve. What is "no traction" supposed to mean? Aegis Defenders has 1,656 reviews at the moment. There's the assumption floating about that you can roughly multiply this by 50 to get the number of owners, which would turn out to about 80,000. The price point is fluctuating between $19.99 and $4.99. Will it net the developer/publisher less money over its lifetime than its development cost?

In any case, I think that one of the biggest factors is not merely the game's quality, but whether there are a lot of players hungry for a game's specific concept and genre. Making an "excellent game" in an oversaturated genre, or in a genre where games require some network effect to take off (any multiplayer game), is much more risky. Don't just make something good; make something that a lot of people want even when the product is less than perfect.

EDIT: VG Insights estimates $770k gross revenue. That's just for the Steam version. The game was also published on PlayStation 4 and Switch. The developer team seems to have been small.

Based on your reply to the sibling comment, you're just pointing out the "contrast" to the success of Balatro? I honestly don't get the point. I don't think the particular amount of success that break-out hits achieve matters to the discussion. If Balatro had a million reviews, would you expect Aegis Defenders to also have a lot more reviews and sales? I think this isn't relevant to the question whether excellent games will succeed (for me this means: enable the developers to make a good living) with some predictability or whether it's due to luck, and whether there exist a lot of excellent but unknown games.

[johnnyanmac]

>Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief.

It's very falsifiable. Just not by us, as we have no acccess to the sales data, nor enough public sales points to make a proper statistical analysis. The best ones out there are either based on estimations (especially reviews to sales ratios) or non-public data you pay the NPD or someone similar thousands to access (and obviously you're not allowed to share that data). So someone truly curious can pay a lot of money to get an answer.