The brutality of the marketplace is unlike any other - Steam has over 100k games in it's store, with 18k added just last year. Yes, as in anything there will be the breakout few which go on to generate fame and riches, but in general if you are a single or small group indie with little to no marketing budget you are unlikely to ever turn a profit. As the saying goes "just because you wandered through the desert does not mean there is a promised land."
Well the problem I feel is that there is a disconnect between game devs chasing success or even just love making games and the desires of the core gaming crowd.
The majority of games being released today are in a few crowded genres, that frankly the majority care very little for. Go outside that, the space for competition quickly dwindles that just a proper, non exceptional execution would be sufficient for success.
Take Project Wingman for example, considering there is literally only ONE other competitor in Ace Combat 7 for a modern arcade jet fighter game, it was very much axiomatic from the trailers alone that it would be successful, and it was.
The same thing with ELIN, or Forever Winter, Noita by the sheer virtue of ambition of their ideas, even a flawed execution may be sufficient to drive a loyal crowd.
Success is the conjuction between ambition and execution, and if we presume one is dedicated to execute, then there are plenty of ambitious ideas waiting to be realized. If someone tried to make a successor to Mirrors Edge, or mech game in the vein of ACFA, or an Anime-style FPS, and with decent execution, I would be very sure of their success. It has nothing to do with luck here.
It's definitely sobering. I don't necessarily want to make money (gamedev is what I would do if I _didn't_ need to eat) but it would be really cool to get some recognition, or even just have a community of 100 people who _really_ liked and care about my game. Given the sheer amount of indie games out there (and the number of games that I see advertised yet give no thought to), it seems less and less likely to achieve that as time goes on. The best time to release your indie game is probably 15 or 20 years ago, when the barrier to entry was a little higher (thank goodness for all of the free tools we have today, but geez has it allowed a lot of competition to appear!).