Can you fuel your argument with some examples? I hear the argument in similar forms a lot, how a lot of good games failed because of bad marketing or just no luck. But I never see any examples. The response I get to my question is usually "I don't know of an example precisely because it never got popular", but I find it very fallacious - if there's thousands of good games out there, that failed to be popular, surely you would stumble into a few of them. A claim that a game either is popular and makes money, or is not popular and no one ever hears about it - is a false dichotomy.
Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.
I must admit it's a very good example, overwhelmingly positive on Steam with 1987 ratings, so it's hard to argue the game is bad.
If I compare Chicory, A Colorful Tale (A) to Stardew Valley B:
A: 97%/1987 B: 98%/483781 on Steam
A: 93.2%=2317 B: 97.33%=562`831 on Steam.db
I don't know where the disparity comes from, but those 4 % are significant. And here's something even more important:
A: 8 in game B: 36`293 in game
8/1987 = 0.4%, whereas 36`293/483781 = 7.5%! Stardew Valley, it seems, has 18.75× more replayability (which absolutely makes sense just based on genre).
Also price:
A: $14 to $20 B: $7.49 to $15
Shouldn't be surprising a game that is considerably cheaper, is more fun and provides that fun for an order of magnitude more time, sells better. It also was released earlier, so it got more sales from the "tail" sales, as well as it provided more value in the form of updates. In fact when I look now at the player count history, it's uneven, perhaps driven by updates, but the tendency is that it grows!
One more thought: maybe Stardew Valley makes for a better streaming content for some reason?
Perhaps Chicory deserves less sales than Stardew Valley, but still considerably more than it got? Maybe its good reviews come from the fact the game reaches the niche very well, it's clear what you do in the game (paint), but maybe this niche is just small?
I can admit I never heard about this game, despite its very high rating.
I wouldn’t compare Chicory with Stardew: for one, Stardew was genre-defining (as some people call things soulslikes, a whole heap of games are trying to capture Stardew). Replay ability of Stardew is part of its specific genre niche, where Chicory is again more like Zelda, in which replay ability isn’t a huge selling point to the game (although I find chicory just as fun as a Zelda to replay). Additionally stardew expanded multiple times throughout its development. I’m certain chicory’s devs would’ve done the same had it had it’s deserved attention at launch.
Now that I’m looking at my steam library I have some other games I think deserve more attention:
- Citizen Sleeper is not unlike Disco Elysium or a visual novel. But its mix of space opera and cyberpunk dystopia is extremely compelling. Excellent OST, and heartfelt characters. You get a real sense of the desperation and humanity of the impoverished, the undocumented, the refugee. The word building is deep and expansive (a sequel is coming, to not enough fanfare imo).
- Umarangi Generation is a photography game where you are playing as a propagandist during an ecologically-vibed apocalypse. You explore scenes of war, poverty, luxury, and terror, taking photographs all the while for the cause. The capacity to tell a deeply layered story with multiple political factions and economic groups merely through environment is stunning. The expansion is absolutely seething with anger.
Yes. As you probably also know, "Harvest Moon" the name is no longer "Harvest Moon" th inspiration behind Stardew and many other crafting games. The actual devs behind it lost the rights to the name while "Harvest Moon" the IP devolved into generic crafting game #1243. The devs continued on under the new name (in the West) of "Story of Seasons"
That branding cost a lot of noteriety in the West.
I have no hidden agenda here, so I compared, I admit, peaches to oranges, Chicory to Stardew, just because Stardew was the first popular indie game I found to compare with. Feel free to choose a successful indie game within the same genre as the Chicory, and then we can try to analyze the differences again.
> Stardew was genre-defining
What is the argument here, that it was very good? That's exactly my point, it was very successful because of how good it was (rather than lucky).
My point is merely to counterpoint the claim that no one can cite specific good games that simply fall through the cracks of popularity even though on its merits they are quite excellent quality. Chicory is arguably in that category and then I followed up with a few more. If I wanted to lower my standards to stuff that I found charming but not deeply moving, I could name a few more after that.
Good indie games are ignored all the time. I tend to seek out indie games explicitly because I don’t have a huge attraction to most “triple a” style games (I dislike fps, sports, 4x, mmo, puzzle, and sex appeal. So I’m mostly limited to not-Witcher open word rpg. Platformers, roguelikes, metroidvanias, horror survival etc. tend to be indie.) So basically I’m usually stuck with “why doesn’t anyone scream about this game more”. Rain World was like that until Downpour came out, finally some fucking attention to it!
The sales:reviews ratio on Steam varies pretty hard, but tends to be around 60:1. That would leave Chicory selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies, and likely performing upwards of the 90th percentile. That's not especially neglected.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that we're all snowflakes to some degree. And so it can feel unfair when a game that really hits our preferences just doesn't receive as much attention as we think it deserves, but that may not necessarily be because people are unaware of the game, but simply because our preferences are not necessarily widely shared.
It's kind of like how in writing a Dan Brown is always going to be vastly more popular than an e.g. Dostoyevsky. It's simply that one author has much more mass appeal than the other. It can feel like a shame for fans of the latter, but it's the way society has always been and probably always will be.
I don’t know what CGA means in this case, but you don’t have to match colors if you’re concerned about colorblind ness. Distinct art styles are a standout in many extremely popular indie games (Cassette Beasts just came out with a ton of fanfare and distinct style, Cult of the Lamb is also a new indie game with distinct style, Cuphead if you want to go back a few years…)
