Experimental games are always going to be risky. Same goes for games that are primarily meant to be art.

We may not all like platformers or FPS or RPG games, but there's a known audience for those types of games. Things which don't fit into an established niche are going to be risky because you don't just have to create an enjoyable game, you also have to find ways of letting players know what the game is about before you can even think of trying to get them to part with their money for it.

It's kind of sad, but sequels are always going to have an advantage, as are games that are in established markets. It doesn't mean that people shouldn't create experimental indie games, just that they shouldn't expect to make much money doing so.

People also forget that before Super Mario Brothers was released, the team making it spent tons of time watching real players play and seeing what the players actually did rather than what the designers expected them to do. Changes were made to make the experience more enjoyable and ultimately, the game was a massive hit. They had a good idea to start with, but they spent a massive amount of time figuring out how to cater to their audience.

The other lesson here is that you have to do a lot of research ahead of time about what sorts of games people are willing to pay. This isn't much different from being a screenwriter where the good ones will typically pitch their idea to virtually anybody they can corner before they start actually writing the script. Because it doesn't much matter how great the story is, how likable the characters are or how clever the plot twist is, if you're trying to sell Springtime for Hitler, you're probably not going to have much of a market for it and in some parts of the world, such a work would be illegal.

Do you know what else Super Mario Bros had? Advertising. Word of mouth. Giant booths in retail on Nintendo's own dollar. A shoddy toy robot. And a history. People knew who/what Nintendo was. They made Donkey Kong, those neat Game and Watch Systems and several arcade games; further back they made playing cards and more.

Which still made it a risky thing. And it still is. The Wii-U bombed, and many people (myself included) thought the Switch was an idiotic idea.

In this day in age, there are far better, practically risk free ways to get a game known. Offer free copies to streamers and youtubers, social media (the guy had 4000+ followers on twitter), or even putting up a thread on forums and forum like platforms. (Reddit, et al.) Heck, I didn't even realize the contest thread was actually for the game!

It also takes far less effort and paperwork than a TV ad, radio ad, or even a paper ad.

i guess you didn't read the actual postmortem either...

You're both wrong.

There's an audience for this type of games, but not necessarily for your game in particular. There are metric fucktons of low-budget FPSes and RPGs languishing in obscurity, and AAA fails sink their studios (if not publishers) just as indie fails do. Andromeda wasn't a success despite promising intial sales. Amalur was a massive failure. Both were sickeningly mass-market.

It's even more inexplicable with "experimental" indie games that have name recognition and persistent teams (as opposed to AAA studios, where key people come and go) and have already carved out their own oligopolized niches. Sunless Sea sold. Sunless Skies did not. Gone Home sold. Tacoma did not.

Nope. There are games which stream well and move copies (plunkbat, cauldron guy), and there are games which don't. Videos of "narrative games" in particular actively poach sales. Twitter followers either have bought the game or are useless.

...isn't that evidence that forum threads don't work?

name calling? shifting the goal post? not trying to understand the main concept you brought up - game postmortems?

I agree with all of that. My point was that they spent a ton of time and effort on the necessary R&D and customer research to know that if they could get their product in the right shops in front of the right customers that there'd be enough people interested in the game to make up for the large risk they took in paying for the display set ups at a time when there were doubts about the console market coming back to the US.

Marketing as important as it is to the success of a product, only really works if you've got something that people want to buy. You can trick a few people into buying, but as soon as word gets out that the product is a fraud or if the people who buy don't evangelize, you have a product that's not going to see much success.
I'm not sure how this is inconsistent with what I said. Experimental games are going to be risky because there isn't a proven market. You don't have any way of knowing how many people will really buy that type of a game, because it's either the first or at least one of the first few in that niche. There may well be a market for it, but you don't know how big it is up front.

And yes, there are tons of low-budget games in those areas, but that doesn't negate the point that there's less risk involved. At this point, we have a pretty good idea what constitutes a quality FPS experience, or platformer or RPG, the main issue for those low budget games is standing out amongst a huge amount of competition. AAA games tend to fare a bit better as they've got more money to throw at game mechanics, graphics and selling the gamers on why they would want to play that particular game.

We don't live in a managed economy, there's going to be AAA games that fail and a bunch of low budget games that never get enough attention to sell. But, that doesn't change the fact that it's more predictable what's going to happen than it is if you're the first person to invent a new game type where you can't just make the players aware that the game exists, you also have to sell them that this is a type of game that they would like to play.

Clarifying the point on articles centered around a post sales review by a dev isn't shifting the goalposts.
The closet thing to name calling is you getting worked up by calling people rude after seeing a picture of Sting in spacepants.

um.. no.... that's just silliness without any relation to the topic, i.e. a point showing your complete lack of understanding.

You're lack of understanding?
Sting is reported as a narrator in parts of the game.

I think we should draw a line under this thread, as you already got your answer to your question

if you have another agenda, then please state this clearly. so it can be dealt with

I feel you. I have no problems with English but sometimes playing in your first language is just more immersive and relaxing. A badly made translation would be even worse than not having one. If the dev is making $ 0 how do you expect him to pay for a professional translation in Italian, and why, given that Italy is a smaller market. Same for other languages.