[kibbi]

I think that extreme outliers like Flappy Bird (which the developer developed over a couple of days and probably didn't expect any significant return) just muddle these discussions. They're irrelevant if you want to suss out what happens in the usual case.

[johnnyanmac]

I agree, but when talking with these "where the hidden gems" audience, any example I point out will be "an exception". it makes the entire conversation a bit tiring, no matter how much you research the market these kinds of people have their opiions set, with no skin in the game.

[baobabKoodaa]

The usual case of good games which fail commercially because of bad marketing? How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"? The reason I talked about Flappy Bird is that the game's late success proves that its early failure was due to bad marketing. If you only want to talk about games which never succeeded commercially, then I have no way of proving to you that any of those were "good" games.

[somenameforme]

> How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"?

Steam reviews are a great way. Lots of folks, including myself, try or tried to seek out these hidden gems on Steam. And Steam provides some great tools to try to find them. [1] It just turns out that there simply aren't many games at all with genuinely high reviews, but very low player numbers.

There's a whole bunch of great games in the ~200 reviews category with high reviews, but I'd generally consider that successful. The average game gets something like 60:1 sales:reviews, so 200 reviews is around 12,000 copies sold. You're not going to be getting rich off those numbers, but that's more than enough to live an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/0