5 Reasons People Wont Buy Your Game 

"bad rewiev. No sex with character-x."

Generally, if it's just trolls, they'll be drowned out by the good reviews though. I'd also add a pair of additional things: 5- Retconning your game or characters drastically from what your core following has accepted as cannon. A common trope with this is gender or race swapping your a character from the established cannon, usually to inject present day politics into your game. Fans are by definition very passionate about the characters and lore that's built into your game, and altering that will piss them off. 6- Insulting your fan base. This usually happens after a developer has violated one or more of the other 5 patterns above, but is especially common for the last 5 or 6 years in mainstream producers in all areas of entertainment. If you are a developer and did something bad with your game, insulting your core audience is not the way to patch things up. Communicating with them and finding out why they're so unhappy and what you an do to satisfy them is the way to dig your way out of such a hole. Unfortunately political extremism, pride or ego will get in the way and the developers will attack their fans, in many cases permanently damaging their reputation and relationship with the people who most love their past games and would otherwise have been the most likely to buy future games.

Competition.

@@laniakeadev.2271 sometimes competition is not the reason for that. I know several gamedevs who really thought that they didn't need to do any marketing of the game whatsoever and that it's purely luck-based industry. They were really surprised to figure out that you need to work your ass off to promote your product these days.

Wholeheartedly agreed.

He actually points that out in another video. I think it was "mistakes that will kill your indie game." It's very true. A successful game has hype built up even before release. Make a fan base that will be happy with the eventual release of your game.

Pravda :D

True. I've seen reviews point out that the game in question is no more exciting than a browser game, with the main difference being that it costs money. The same reviews also mention that the free games had more content.

I agree. Reviews are more of a by-product of success/failure, not something you can control up front. Good marketing gets you the sale, making a good game gets you the positive review (mostly).

Dwarf Fortress is a good example. It’s fun and systemically deep but impossible for the average person to understand.

@@tim-ruswick True!!! Thanks for the example.

@@ac3_train3r_blak34 Cruelty squad was apparently designed to be as ugly as possible and has great reviews.

Slay the Spire

not such great advice for screenshots as key art. There is a reason why most companies use professional art in their icons etc. When you A/B test it, you just find out it works better because just screenshots made into icon come off usually as cheap...

@Frank Fox. I've had great success doing this very thing, especially early on with mobile games. It all depends on how it is modified, and enhanced to really stand out. You simply use only a portion of a screenshot. If you're creative, there are many tricks and enhancements here.