The best game that exhibits this is Among Us, but not in the way you think.
What you're actually getting at here is a hypothesis that success for a game isn't contingent on circumstances, a variant on the "a truly good game, will sell" hypothesis.
Among Us is a very clear case study to the contrary; it's a clear example that success, even for "truly good games" -- IS contingent on circumstances. Being a good game -- whatever that means -- is necessary, but not sufficient.
Among US was released in 2018 and it was a flop. I know the development team, and before the game released they were ready to call it quits any day.
It wasn't until 2020 that a particular streamer picked it up and that, combined with the pandemic, vaulted it to mega success. If that hadn't happened, it would have been a flop to this day.
This was a multiplayer game, and so if at ANY POINT they had given up the ghost and just shut the servers down -- as they very well could have totally rationally done -- it would have never taken out, and if I were to have shown you Among Us as a game that was good but didn't succeed, I'm sure you'd pick it apart and say, well of course it wouldn't succeed, look how much it sucks.
Do you also know singleplayer games that are examples of truly good games that don't sell? I can totally understand that it's hard to get the ball running with a multiplayer game where it's necessary that enough other players are online at the same time.
I'm sceptical of the assumption that "you can make a truly good game and there's a good chance that it won't sell at all" that can be found in online discussions. Instead, Ryan Clark's approach to consistently make profitable indie games seems very plausible to me.
So I would add a few caveats to the hypothesis that "a truly good game will sell", such as the importance of selecting a viable genre and ensuring that development costs are not overly high, but otherwise I still believe in it...
This is a great anecdote. There's always so much competition in B2C products that there is always some element of luck.
I have to say that although I agree with this example here, I've seen lots of examples of games that, for all intents and purposes, became successful simply because they were good. Games like Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Project Zomboid, Factorio, Hyper Light Drifter, etc. A lot of these games had insanely small budgets, horrible conditions and/or adversity and yet their creators persevered.
If you make a good product, you will eventually find a market for it. At least, that's my take. But I totally get the other perspective. There's definitely an element of survivorship bias here.
To be fair the market forces that apply to multiplayer games are quite different from singleplayer, on multiplayer you have network effects and such to worry about. I, personally sorta... buy the twitter cope? But I think it obviously doesnt apply to Multiplayer.
Altho, actually going to check my assumptions.. I found that out of 200-ish randomly selected steam games. I could find about 5 that were singleplayer, genuinely unpopular and looked good in screenshots/descriptions. Out of those only 2 didn't review poor to middling, and 1 of those passed the subjective test of "Would I play this?".
What you're actually getting at here is a hypothesis that success for a game isn't contingent on circumstances, a variant on the "a truly good game, will sell" hypothesis.
Among Us is a very clear case study to the contrary; it's a clear example that success, even for "truly good games" -- IS contingent on circumstances. Being a good game -- whatever that means -- is necessary, but not sufficient.
Among US was released in 2018 and it was a flop. I know the development team, and before the game released they were ready to call it quits any day.
It wasn't until 2020 that a particular streamer picked it up and that, combined with the pandemic, vaulted it to mega success. If that hadn't happened, it would have been a flop to this day.
This was a multiplayer game, and so if at ANY POINT they had given up the ghost and just shut the servers down -- as they very well could have totally rationally done -- it would have never taken out, and if I were to have shown you Among Us as a game that was good but didn't succeed, I'm sure you'd pick it apart and say, well of course it wouldn't succeed, look how much it sucks.