I hear this "luck" thing a lot but not sure that's the case. It's probably more originality + quality. So few undiscovered gems out there, thousands of average things though.
In no other industry/medium do you see nearly as much survivorship bias as in discussion around videogames.
I’ve always liked to think of it as a lottery, but where there are a ton of things you can do to buy yourself more tickets.
Doing the bare minimum is unlikely to bring you success, but it does happen… on the other hand sometimes a game will have a lot of things going for it and still perform poorly.
Also of all the things that are likely to bring a game success, originality is quite far down the list. That’s one of those areas where survivorship bias has a huge influence. (source: I’ve been a self-sustaining indie game dev for 12 years)
I don't want to sound dismissive, but saying "a game will have a lot of things going for it" to me sounds like about average. I mean it can still work out, but it does raise a flag.
> I’ve been a self-sustaining indie game dev for 12 years.
The quality of that 'average' has absolutely skyrocketed in the last decade or so, as ever-more-powerful tools have become available for ever-lower prices. But at the same time, we're also seeing 'indie' games with larger budgets than ever, either funded by publishers and or previous successes.
But games have been massively devalued over the last decade or so, when you've got AAA games practically given away (Game Pass, PS Plus, Steam sales), and indie games bundled up and sold for pennies, alongside the rise of F2P.
So now starting an indie game team is like starting an indie band. If you've got a bit of talent and put the effort in, you now have access to inexpensive high-end tools to unleash your creativity. But if you want to actually make money from your endeavours, it's getting ever-harder. And with the relative easy of porting games build with Unity/Unreal, even brand new platforms have completely oversaturated stores more or less by launch day, too.
