>>713738060 (OP)
The reality is that there is no reliable way to tell which indie games will succeed or fail before release. You can always look after the fact and go
>"well, [game a] succeeded because it did [thing x], [thing y], and [thing z]"
But you can almost always find other games that also did [thing x], [thing y], and [thing z] but did not succeed for one reason or another.
It's more luck than people are prepared to admit and unfortunately, people are conditioned to call this a "cope" because they're not comfortable with the idea that [thing they've never heard of] could possibly be as good as [thing they have heard of] and grasp at anything that helps to make [game a]'s success and [game b]'s failure seem more rational, more tangible, easier to explain away with logic.
