This feels like they completely missed the reasons that they failed, which is a great way to ensure they fail again. I don't know how you can blame marketing with a straight face when your game was featured on multiple Nintendo front pages. That's more marketing than like 99.9% of games get, and you're performing way worse than average. The issue isn't marketing.

In the article when it gets to the question of whether the game is fun, the developer beats around the bush. 'Well you see...' which is as good as saying, "no." What's "fun" in a hyper-social 'indie fest' type of environment with a bunch of people wanting to like everything, has little relationship to what's fun when you're at home with some friends. In the right environment people can get really hyped and excited over a literal snail race [4]. It doesn't mean those people are watching snail race reruns at home.

Then there's the game itself. You can find the game/discussion of it here [1]. There were many complaints about bugs, misleading labeling, poor/buggy and unremappable controls, and more. There were also somewhat more 'positive' questions like somebody simply asking how to even play local-coop since it seems its not well elaborated on in the game. And the developer chose to completely ignore everything and everybody, making a grand total of 4 posts - including 2 about a negative review.

There is no recipe for success in games, beyond making good games. Games have become easier to make than ever (even back in 2016), players now have to-play queues months to years long, and there are simply a lot of really good games out there and more being released every day. This game, a silly casual party style game, was directly competing, in 2016, with games like Ultimate Chicken Horse [2].

There's also a lot of other problems. The game's theme isn't unique. It feels like a Goat Simulator [3] rip off, in terms of theme, even today. Incidentally Goat Simulator released just a couple of years prior to this game, so it was going to be bucketed there even harder back then. There's also the issue of price. You're going to be compared against games of the same price (such as Goat Simulator, again), and $10 is a relatively hefty price for this sort of game.

The game almost certainly would have well more than 5x the success it did at a price tag like $2, where it can be more comfortably bought as a joke or whatever. And if you want to get into meta-market gimmicking, add Steam cards. There's lots of collectors who will pick up cheap games with cards because in a number of cases, cheap games on discount can be bought for 'profit', where the card values themselves become worth more than the game.

But really most of all, just make a fun game. We live in an era where games can stay purchasable indefinitely on both PC and consoles. If you make a game that people will organically go out of their way to recommend, you're going to succeed. There's an ever increasing number of long-tail successes, and in games I expect this to increasingly become the norm. Even for games like GTA V, it's long tail success [5] is really starting to rival that up-front success that marketing budgets in the hundreds of millions buy.

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[1] - https://steamcommunity.com/app/342920/discussions/

[2] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386940/Ultimate_Chicken_H...

[3] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/265930/Goat_Simulator/

[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-6Wwd184uo

[5] - https://steamplayercount.com/app/271590