Easy: Among Us, for the many months that it toiled in nearly complete obscurity to the point of the development team nearly giving up the ghost and quitting, until one specific streamer picked it up and gave it the critical mass attention it needed to go absolutely huge. Had the developers had slightly less resources and shut down the servers before that crucial moment it would have never happened, even though clearly Among Us is a fantastic game in retrospect.
Quality is necessary but not sufficient for success.
Also: a while back, I wanted to empirically test the "any good game will succeed on steam, and if it doesn't succeed, it isn't a good game" hypothesis by setting up a little metagame called "Steam Prophet". We would track upcoming steam games and try to predict which ones would succeed BEFORE they came out. We eventually disbanded the project when we got so reliably good (but not perfect) at predictions that we got bored and quit. Turns out that just a few leading metrics were incredibly predictive of day 1 (and thus day 30, day 60, and day 90, and year 1) success -- chiefly the number of followers the game had on Steam on launch day. It is a rare game indeed that can succeed on Steam without first having banked tons of high quality wishlists (of which followers is a public proxy metric for).
The spirit of Steam Prophet lives on today in the form of Simon Carless' Game Discover Co newsletter, which obsessively follows upcoming and newly released Steam Games:
https://gamediscover.co/
The problem with Among Us is that it's an online game. Meaning you need a certain amount of actual people playing it before it's fun. So it's a chicken or egg problem; it's not fun without players, players won't join if it's not fun.
If you got that good at predictions, doesn't that show that for most games, it's usually not a lottery at all?
Aside from rare cases like Flappy Bird, and aside from the usual vagaries of commercial, technological and artistic projects. And aside from special challenges like the minimum playerbase size required for an online game like Among Us.
During development, developers could set up a Steam page, release one or two trailers as soon as possible (with mocked-up gameplay if necessary), and try to predict the audience's interest by the increase of followers/wishlists (compared to other games). In case of a lukewarm reception, they could decide to drop this game and start developing another one.
Did you write about the leading metrics and your insights somewhere, aside from this article, which seems to be from the beginning of your "Steam Prophet" project?
Most developers have very little understanding of marketing, and are very hesitatnt to pay for good marketing services.
Here's something most people won't tell you: the majority of online marketing is paid, either explicitly (i.e. you pay Google) or covertly (i.e. you "bribe" an editor at Forbes to feature your article).
That's difficult to evaluate since "good" is subjective. So is "selling well", to be honest. I assume you mean a game that is reasonably finished and polished and not simply shovelware, but still not getting the sales to be profitable. There are tons. 30 games drop on Steam everyday. Just sort by new and see all the games that any little indie studio would be proud to release but have few sales.
I've seen many. Wuppo didn't sell well until it was called out by an algorithm as the most underrated game on Steam or something like that. Of course, "good" is very subjective. I personally don't think the most popular games are any good.
It IS subjective.
For a game of its kind it can have sold realy well yet not have sold enough to make up for a poor management and way too big of a debt.
It wouldn't change the reality of "it sold well" but still validate "it didn't sell well enough"
