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"Our game made €4 million," says Rise of Industry's creator. "Three years later, I was broke"
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
There is no "marketing" strategy that will push a bad game to success.
Do some networking, coordinate with other gamedevs, genuinely be interested in their stuff, they will be genuinely interested in yours, take feedback seriously.
Any game with a good shot at success has historically looked so remarkable, so unique that they will stick out and won't need much more than a few social media posts and one or two influencers to notice it. Most youtubers have business emails. If you send it to 100 people whose job it is to discover and promote the next new hot thing and NOBODY picks it up, your issue is not marketing, you just have a bad product.
I could write a book on eve online. That one is insidious. The hook is that you dream of getting the upgrade, which takes real world time to get, both in farming and in "skill training" time that's passive and works while you're offline but measured in real world time and can only be boosted but still takes months to do. So you sit there and think "oh boy it'll be so cool when I finally can do X" and then you get it and it's pretty much the same you were doing before, but bigger numbers.
It also got community and then you have friends and don't to leave your friendgroup
And the devs? Deliver banger shows that show what they're planning. Planning being sort of the catch, because in the nearly 15 years I've been watching what they're doing, they did things I would call "correct", one which they reverted (because the players were running away) and the other which they nerfed.
More recently skilksong. All the elements for a fantastic game are there, art, especially the music are unbelievable. But upgrade system, the placing of where you can get them, what they actually do, some of the resources and currencies. That part just sucks.
And for some reason, the game and the community ship the main character and a mass murdering psychopath? Just wild.