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this is purely my own gut feeling and i’d love actual devs input, but i get the sense that on top of everything else collapsing, one of the big struggles in games is that the Normal Iterative Sequel, reasonably scoped and made on a quick schedule, seems to sell like six copies now

it depends extremely heavily but yeah you have to expand further because the biggest problem is just the eyeballs. eyeballs are driven by algorithms are driven by novelty. and of course people still like "new thing that's old thing but new" but if it's too much the same it doesn't move the needle

social media's efficacy has also basically fallen off outside of (only sometimes!) tiktok. this means you have to be in a showcase (meaning it needs to feel like Big News) or be talked up by a youtube vid or a stream if your game cost any money to make or the money has just been lit on fire

yeah seems downstream from the dominance of algorithms and just the total collapse of a "games media" or "gamer" identity as instead the audience seperates to algorithmically assigned boxes for existing genres or simply brands. i dunno what to do with no mass audience for generalist curation

the only answer i've landed on is intrinsically understanding how normal people will receive your game because that matters so much more than anything else. that's step one to being really good at turning your thing into an Event, which is unfortunately not a skillset many people have