That applies to games people know about. If nobody knows about your game then it doesn’t count. For example Vampire survivors barely made any money on the first few weeks of its early access release. In fact it didn’t really start making money until youtubers/streamers essentially advertised it for free.
But that’s an anomaly compared to most game releases. It would be foolish to assume that this game has a Vampire Survivors or Among Us esque curve ahead of it.
It’s an anomaly in terms of success. It’s not an anomaly in terms of how a good game becomes a success. There’s no successful game that people haven’t heard of. Nobody knew about vampire survivors when it came out so it didn’t get sales. It got sales when people started to hear about it. Same with among us. In fact letting people know a game exists and making it appealing is probably more important than having a good game. The day before is a great example of that.
It doesn’t matter how good reviews the genre gets if nobody knows it exists it’s not going to sell. I guarantee 99% of the people reading that article had no idea this game even existed and if this article made waves on reddit this game would definitely see a spike in sales. So far it hasn’t really made waves so most people are still unaware of this game. In light of that it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the game is not selling.
Also sidenote, holy fuck this game has an unmemorable name. I had to open the article again so I could find the steam player numbers. That name is definitely not helping the sales.
Exactly, also making good games consistently gets you fans. I’ve been a fan of the company that made Hades since I got their first game in a humble bundle. A lot of people got into their second game. Their third was fine. But if they hadn’t had a reputation for making great games (and I don’t think Bastion or Transistor was the most marketable game) I don’t think Hades would’ve blown up like it did.
So yeah the dev needs to learn to better market, keep marketing, and keep making games that build loyal customer bases.
It’s an anomaly for a game’s prospects to get better after the first week than how it does right when it launches. If you want to say it’s a failure of marketing, sure, but the time to correct that marketing problem, in more than 99% of cases, was before it launched. There’s another comment here that says that looking at it after reading the article, they still don’t want to buy it. And for some reason I can’t put my finger on, I’m right there with them.