Anyone who works in games development or publishing can tell you that the success of any given game is largely down to luck.

It’s perfectly possible for a dev to make all the right decisions and still lose, and in fact that’s what happens the majority of the time.

Yes Hollow Knight is a great game, but I guarantee there are dozens - if not hundreds - of games that are just as good but only sold a handful of copies and are doomed to languish in obscurity in the dusty corners of Steam.

Good question.

Luck is always an element of success. I’m confident there are other indie titles with similar levels of gameplay, music, and art style, with just as much passion poured in, that just never caught the viral wave. It’s a big world out there.

Obviously the dev set their project up well for that success, making it more likely, but it’s still a dice roll.

I’ve heard very successful movie/TV actors talk about seeing nobodies blow their minds in local theater productions, people who never got the stroke of luck required to make it big. Plenty of successful people forget that they owe no small part of their success to luck.

It's kinda like how you need to be really really really good to become the next Tailor Swift or Michael Jackson. But even IF you are really fucking amazing, you still need to be super fucking lucky, because there are millions of other people just as good, or maybe better.

You can be the best musician in history, but unless you know someone big in the industry, the likelyhood of ever actually becoming anything is about as high as winning the lottery.

Same thing with games.

I think it was Rami Ismail (maybe Bennet Foddy...) who described luck in the games industry as being a vital factor, but every time you make a game and put information out there about your games, you're re-rolling the dice. They played a great game, it's still a matter of getting the right rolls at the right time.

Getting lucky doesn't discount skill and hard work, but getting unlucky does, and the majority of talented people making great games have been unlucky.

There are plenty of solid indie games out there. If a friend wanted to quit his job and play bass guitar I’d tell him to slow down. The Redditors were harsh but, “don’t quit your day job” is applicable to 99.9% of devs who won’t make it big.

I don’t mean to disparage my favorite game, but it was absolutely luck. Everything comes down to luck, whether it’s catching the attention of the right person, settling into the store at the right time, or any number of little things. Having an excellent product is irrelevant compared to the fickleness of reality. You’ve described hundreds, if not thousands of games that failed.

Skill is an intrinsic part of the equation, but everything comes down to luck.

It's the consumer bandwagon.

The luck involved is that enough people found out about his game, played it, then recommended it to others who did the same.

They released a solid game with fun gameplay, great music, and an eye-catching art style. They priced the game competitively, even considering international pricing. All of this seems like choices that were made with intention, not the roll of a dice.

Okay, going with your logic, what about the games that have all of this and still are commercial failures? There is literally no shortage of them, even if you personally haven't heard of them.