Not to diminish the dev, but I did see this promoted in a Steam sale, and with 200+ reviews, that's not exactly chump change. Also it was released only a week ago. From watching the trailer, that's more or less the numbers I expect that kind of game to be pulling.
Its definitely a hard thing for most indie devs to do on their own. Its a totally separate skillset that most of us don't have but can definitely be learned.
You need to advertise enough to get people playing and talking first. There's about 50 games pet day released on steam. It's easy to get Los in the noise.
You 1000% will not get lost in the noise if you put out a helldivers like quality game. Thereās nerds everyday combing through steam store looking for the next great games.
Helldivers with zero marketing would have made significantly less but still been a resounding commercial success
Thereās no hidden gems in steam. Games sell as well as they should for their quality. Thereās margin of error of course like a low quality game sells on the higher end due to good marketing or a high quality game sells low end due to poor marketing.
Yeah but there are definitely games that are terrible with extreme marketing budgets that sell really well, that's a lot of triple A games in a nutshell