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SOUL PARK (in early access), a themepark "at the gates of hell" management game, releases demo on Steam
(store.steampowered.com)
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It is extremely hard. From what I've heard sales of ~10,000 units is considered a strong showing in the indie scene.
The whole market is extremely top heavy. You have have a few big winners that see runway success, a slightly larger group with modest "break even plus" type performance and 10,000 of thousands of indie devs that get no coverage whatsoever. In addition to having a well thought out and implemented concept (which is extremely difficult to do), you need a lot of luck.
IMO, the challenge lies in the lack of discoverability; an extremely difficult challenge for any consumer-facing marketplace. The major consumer stores (Steam, Apple, Google) don't have any real incentive to work on discoverability since it's so hard and they have a quasi-monopoly anyway. The topics-focused independent communities that were big drivers of discoverability (especially in mid-market and niche segments) in the 90s and 2000s are all dead or dying. You do have youtube which offers a modicum of coverage of niche segments, but then we are back to square one; discoverability of mid-market and niche channels. And Google is more focused on engagement ("the next quadrillion customers!1!11") and competing with TikTok, there is simply not enough competition for them to care.