This comment thread is filled to the brim with arguments that either demonstrate a lack of familiarity with video games (excusable, but...) or regular old weak thinking.

A few variations on this core theme:

"The cream will rise to the top"

"Good games will find an audience"

"Create something truly special and you will be successful"

These lines of thinking are all COMPLETE AND UTTER NONSENSE. I would love to live in a world where those statements were true, but they are not. They have never been true in video games, even if they are perhaps true in other industries. Anyone with any experience observing games development, sales and marketing knows that these statements are false.

The vast majority of successful game titles are successful as a result of a finely-tuned marketing and sales pipeline.

The big studios have their own pipeline for this:
Paying staff to contact the news outlets and YouTubers, paying to run television advertisements or put up billboards, doing co-promotional deals (like bundling the Battlefield 4 beta in with another game, etc), advertising their new games via popups in older games, buying installs to climb the app store rankings, etc.

Smaller developers can't use the big studios' bag of tricks, so they use their own:
Forming industry connections, so that developers and other people with big audiences promote the game to their audiences. Building name recognition and dedicated fanbases by shipping lots of games (Jeff Vogel is a textbook example of this - decades of releases!). Building dozens of cheap games and releasing them to try and find something that fans like. Cashing in on the latest trends and buzzwords in order to get good returns. Slaving away for no pay for months or years, killing yourself to make a 'masterpiece'.

Note that many of the above tricks are not guaranteed to work. Some of the highest-profile 'indie successes' in the past few years have actually had poor sales or poor revenues, when you examine their budget. In some cases this is due to actively being undermined by the storefront. Microsoft has a track record of undermining big releases on XBLA by scheduling them at poor times, dropping them from the front page, and otherwise leaving them to die. Some of the other big publishers do this too - Electronic Arts sank a ton of money into Starbreeze's new Syndicate reboot, then spent nearly nothing marketing it and it languished in a pit along with all the other FPSes - even though it's actually a quite solid game from a studio with a great pedigree (reviewers agree).

Here's the reality of building and selling video games:

Building video games is expensive. It probably costs more time & money than you realistically have.

Selling video games is difficult... and expensive. You often have to sink as much time/money into selling your game as you do in building it - lots of contract reviews/negotiation, along with lawyers' fees, time spent prepping builds for each storefront and building storefront/platform-exclusive content (steam workshop, achievements, etc).

Making it possible for players to find your video game is difficult... and expensive. You sink tons of time/money (often over the whole duration of development) reaching out to journalists, youtubers, genre fans, previous customers, and random strangers. You spend money on booths at conventions like PAX, buy banner ads on game-focused websites, build a mailing list, etc.

Even after all this, factors entirely outside your control will fuck you. Your game will get pirated, Steam's checkout flow will break during your launch week, a crippling bug found on launch day will undermine your sales, or market forces will simply shift and leave your game stranded in a market players aren't interested in anymore. Sometimes another developer literally swoops in under you, clones your game outright (based on all that marketing and outreach you've been doing), and steals a huge chunk of your market. This has happened to Vlambeer multiple times and has happened to other big-name indies (Spry Fox, for example).

People interested in dropping some lazy truisms like 'just work hard and build something awesome' are doing themselves a disservice and lowering the level of discourse. There are hard problems here, and many of them are not actively being solved. Some of the problems are within the industry, and mean developers need to make better choices. Some of them are the industry's machinery, with storefronts providing inadequate discovery and unreliable sales pipelines. Some of them are playerbase issues, where players tend to chase after novelty and hot trends (I want a minecraft clone! I want a zombie game!) and don't have discerning tastes.

Many of these problems aren't any one person's fault, they're just problems we have to fix. But nobody is going to fix anything if we keep plugging our ears and yelling "EVERYTHING IS FINE!"