There is a quiet belief many people carry when they start making a game.

If the idea is strong enough, if the execution is honest enough, if the work is done properly, then success will follow. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Players will find it. Interest will grow. The numbers will make sense.

Reality is far less reassuring.

Hard work

Uncertainty

One of the hardest parts of independent game development is not technical difficulty, nor creative exhaustion. It is uncertainty.

I have recently met quite a few fellow developers who are in the same phase: releasing a game, or approaching release, and trying to cope with what comes next. The silence. The stalled numbers. The sense of failure that is hard to name because nothing explicitly went wrong.

Is it a failure? Or a delayed success? When you release a game and people do not come, there is no clear moment of collapse. No definitive signal. Just a slow realization that the future you imagined may not materialize. This ambiguity is often harder to process than a clear rejection.

You release … and people do not come. Not in meaningful numbers. Wishlist counts stay low. Player feedback is sparse. And there is no clear signal telling you why. Is the market simply overcrowded? Is your marketing ineffective? Are your screenshots wrong, your trailer weak, your messaging unclear?

Or is the more uncomfortable explanation true: that the game itself is not as good as you believed it was?

This uncertainty is deeply draining. You try to improve visibility. You rewrite descriptions. You replace images. You experiment with videos, formats, platforms, timing. Each change feels like a guess. Results are ambiguous. Progress, if any, is slow enough to be indistinguishable from noise.

Marketing without feedback

The modern game market offers little feedback and no mercy. Quality does not guarantee attention. Effort does not translate directly into reach. You can do many things right and still fail to be noticed.

This uncertainty is often amplified by marketing advice itself. Strategies are frequently presented alongside success stories, as if the outcome were proof of the method. What is rarely visible are the countless projects that applied similar tactics and saw no meaningful results. Those cases quietly disappear.

In practice, these presentations often market the marketer as much as the method. Success stories serve as credentials. The strategy becomes secondary to the narrative of expertise. Marketing, in this form, promotes itself as a discipline that always works, provided it is applied correctly.

What is missing are the failures. Not because they are rare, but because they are inconvenient. When a strategy does not work, there is no incentive to document it. No talk, no article, no slide deck explains why the same approach led nowhere. As a developer, you are left copying patterns whose unsuccessful outcomes are invisible, with no reliable way to tell whether you are following best practice or simply participating in an unreported failure.

A warning, not a complaint

This is not written as bitterness, nor as an argument against making games.

It is a warning.

If you decide to make a game, do not assume that finishing it is the finish line. Do not assume that a good idea will protect you from disappointment. Be prepared for long periods of doubt, where you cannot tell whether you are facing a marketing problem or a creative one.

The uncomfortable truth is that you may never get a clear answer.

Why continue at all?

The only reliable reason to continue is that the work itself matters to you. If you commit to building something large, slow, and expensive in terms of time and energy, that motivation must be intrinsic. Without it, the uncertainty is difficult to endure.

A large independent game is rarely a rational business decision. It is an emotional commitment made in the absence of reliable signals, clear feedback, or guaranteed outcomes. Treating it as a conventional plan almost guarantees frustration.

Designing for failure

There is, however, a practical alternative. Work in smaller steps. Release early and often. Build things where failure is expected and survivable. Assume that most attempts will not succeed and design your process so that each failure is small, informative, and non-destructive.

Instead of betting years on a single outcome, accept failure as the default state. If something works, it is an exception. If it does not, it is data. This mindset does not remove disappointment, but it makes it bearable.

When you build it, they will come … or not.