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I’m not sure how they started, but Brotato came from a very small studio, and rose up to top-played on Steam Deck and some other charts. It made their creators a lot of money, because they were lucky, sure, but also because they made a very good game and had a platform to sell it from.
As far as I know, Valve’s monetisation scheme for developers is also quite fair. I might be one of those fanboys, but I think they deserve it to some extent. There’s much worse players out there, and with the money Valve is making and the market share they have now, they could absolutely be one of the bad ones and not care.
Is it luck though?
It’s hard to make a game. It’s much harder to make a good game that pushes all the right buttons.
I play some of these games that probably make well under average, and there are very distinct reasons why they didn’t take off.
I believe that there’s always luck involved to some extent. You have a very valid point, though, if a game is THAT good, at some point success becomes the only plausible outcome. So definitely not a hill I would die on.