Kaze no Klonoa

It's a lot of factors (game quality, word of mouth, connections with other people), but honestly, it's just luck. A lot of people have gotten lucky from popular streamers/youtubers playing their games, but nowadays, the most popular streamers only play a small selection of games. Unless you're EA with their 1 million dollar payment for Ninja to stream Apex Legends, you're probably gonna be real out of luck. I've always seen people who have experienced moderate success but in terms of blow-up popularity, that's a lot less common (especially with the huge rise in the amount of game releases, you're really competing against literally everyone). Regarding that, here's some things I've seen work: -Building and maintaining the community of your game yourself: I've seen developers run smaller communities (I help moderate a discord server for a indie project, so I've seen what these kind of servers look like firsthand) to varying levels of success, but it's pretty much always been a net positive. If the developers are actively participating, the community will be 100% on board from the announcement to the game to its eventual release. You'll also be able to get more people who may not know the game to learn more about it by simply joining the community, wherever it be on Reddit, Discord, etc. -Show up at events, not just the internet: I've seen this work firsthand! One of my upcoming projects, UNBEATABLE, got a lot of traction when we demo'd it at MAGFest 2019 (people were lining up just to watch the TV display and listen to the music). Getting at events, no matter how small will really increase a game's chance of visibility, especially because most indie game showings are technically attractions at events, so people will want to go and check out the games for fun. Unfortunately, money, time and transportation can severely impede the ability for this to happen. The online equivalent of this would be game jams and digital conventions, which is starting to pop more often (check notgdc.fun) -Get a publisher: Yeah, no kidding about this one. A good publisher will help out with all the legal stuff, provide additional resources (i.e. money, QA, additional contractors), but also marketing. That's not something a lot of people have success with but a lot of publishers have been responsible for certain games breaking out! Some examples of highly successful indie games include Enter the Gungeon (Devolver Digital), Not Tonight (No More Robots), Hello Neighbor (tinyBuild), and most recently Forager (Humble Bundle). Publishers weren't solely responsible for these games succeeding, but the amount of resources Devolver Digital must had provided surely helped in Enter the Gungeon becoming one of the best selling Switch games of all time. -Try to get the attention of the press and influencers: A lot of game journalism sites are often really busy trying to cover bigger releases (Which is a bit of a issue in itself), but still try contacting them anyways! Having presskits and constantly sending emails to sites could help get attention. Also seek for smaller sites too, any bit of coverage helps, so as long as they aren't trying to scam you. As for streamers/youtubers, you can pretty much try doing the same thing, it's pretty much how tinyBuild get their games all over the place. -Release on as many places as possible: Don't just think Steam. Try to get it on as many storefronts as realistically possible (itch.io is starting to become a more popular haven for smaller indie games). Just know that many storeplaces have different standards and terms (for ex. Steam places many restrictions on its store, requires a upfront fee that will later be refunded, and takes a 30% cut. In comparison, itch.io is very lenient, allows multiple ways of selling games, and you can adjust itch.io's cut from 0-100%). Consoles will prob need the help of a publisher (and like Steam have many rules for their storefront, usually have a 30% cut and also require lots of certification processes) -Interact and meet more people in the indie dev space: Don't think I need to elaborate on this. Just go in the space, have fun and make friends! That's pretty much how I've gotten around. Either way, none of these are really "guaranteed" ways to succeed, but it's what I and a lot of other people I know try to do to better our chances. If anything though, most of my friends seem to just get lucky and their games get a lot of visibility on Twitter on a random day, sparking either a increase in patreon pledges or tons of sales.

Haven’t heard about this at all, but I will stress that unions are very crucial to alleviating this and that if you’re working in the games industry and are frustrated with bad conditions, consider talking to your co-workers and go to a organization like Game Workers Unite (gameworkersunite.org) to get the resources and advice you need to start a union internally. If you’re not involved with the industry, supporting us is more than enough! Most games are often made at the expense of other people and it’s a problem that’s the result of no one condemning awful treatment of workers and disorganized management.