This. Developers got used to the old days of Steam, where just putting your game up for sale was enough. They expect those days to continue, but there’s just no way. There are so many ways to build up a community and hype about their game (assuming it’s good), but they tend to favor not doing these things:
- Find a small publisher who will push your marketing angle.
- Look into social media stuff you can do, such as streaming your game on Twitch or even on Steam itself.
- Open a discord server for your company/game. A game without a discord server nowadays is asking to sell less.
- You can even stream your game development itself on twitch, as Andy does on Pocketwatch’s twitch channel.
- Embrace your community and make them happy. Happy community = people who will do free advertising and work for you.
- If your game is narrative-based, you can’t really spoil it by launching Early Access. But if it’s system-based and you’re a small dev, your best bet nowadays is to launch on Early Access, if only to build up hype and get people to try the game early, and most crucially, to have people act as your testers. Frozen Synapse 2 died because of bugs and took Mode 7 down with it. These bugs would have been caught had the game first been released as early access.