Josh Ling @ Adopt Me!

"indiepocalypse"/general negative-angled biz talk shies sooooo hard away from looking at the games themselves, hahah

It feels like we constantly -fail- to confront the question of "is this what people want", and render that down to a nebulous, responsibility & agency devoid "luck". Review score is only part of the equation.

There was a fairly high profile game that "failed" and the developer had a big write up accepting some responsibility, but blaming other factors. But on reading I couldn't help but notice they had spent like 5 years and a ton of money making a game in a niche genre for 1 platform

Just because you worked really hard and made a cool thing doesn't mean that thing is commercially viable. This shouldn't be a hard concept to understand. We exist under capitalism, in order to actually survive the art you make needs to appeal to enough consumers willing to buy it