It is extremely hard. From what I’ve heard sales of ~10,000 units is considered a strong showing in the indie scene.
The whole market is extremely top heavy. You have have a few big winners that see runway success, a slightly larger group with modest “break even plus” type performance and 10,000 of thousands of indie devs that get no coverage whatsoever. In addition to have a well thought out and implemented concept (which is extremely difficult to do), you need a lot of luck.
IMO, the challenge lies in the lack of discoverability; an extremely difficult challenge for any consumer-facing marketplace. The major consumer stores (Steam, Apple, Google) don’t have any real incentive to work on discoverability since it’s so hard and they have a quasi-monopoly anyway. The topics-focused independent communities that were big drivers of discoverability (especially in mid-market and niche segments) in the 90s and 2000s are all dead or dying. You do have youtube which offers a modicum of coverage of niche segments, but then we are back to square one; discoverability of mid-market and niche channels. And Google is more focused on engagement (“the next quadrillion customers!1!11”) and competing with TikTok, there is simply not enough competition for them to care.
Mikina@programming.dev 9 hours ago
What drove the point home for me was seeing a Twitter account (it was years ago) that posts short 6 second segments of every new game released on steam.
It was posting almost hourly, and while there was a lot of trash, most of the games were of pretty “standart” smaller indie quallity. It’s ruthless.
And in addition with the GDC talk of someone who made literally millions by making a generator that generates super basic slot machine games on various themes (as in, generate a theme (cars, bird…), download a few pictures, place them on slot machine) and uploads them to Play Store (back then you had a limit on 20 games a day, and they did include some more rules about quality in reaction to this talk), and the game were getting thousands of downloads and when they checked how is their script doing after few months, they had like over a million in revenue with thousands of downloads. Sure, it’s about mobile games, but it is hearbreaking when you realize how do the consumers work in reality.