Comment by robrtsql
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!).
A community of 100 players is totally achievable if you are willing to put some time and effort in on social media presence, like a YouTube channel. I worked on a small game and managed to host a Discord server with 40-50 members relatively quickly.