When you are in an over-supplied environment, then marketing becomes more crucial.
Indie games are massively over supplied. Thus to get traction you need to be out-marketing (not necessarily out-spending) the other guy.
In one sense building the game is the easy part. Selling it is the hard part. It's a crowded market, and most games are, well, not great. It takes time, effort, and yes money, to market well, and get any kind of traction.
Arguably OS/2 was better than Windows 95, but MS spent a billion $ marketing it, and today OS/2 is a history footnote, if you've heard of it at all.
The more compeditive the market, the more marketing matters.
Yeah, I don't disagree on why the marketing is needed. I still think it shows something broken about our system when the majority of the time is spent marketing and not producing the product and supporting the customers. In the same way that it is usually a bad sign when the financial markets starts to become too big in comparison to the rest of the economy.
Indie games are massively over supplied. Thus to get traction you need to be out-marketing (not necessarily out-spending) the other guy.
In one sense building the game is the easy part. Selling it is the hard part. It's a crowded market, and most games are, well, not great. It takes time, effort, and yes money, to market well, and get any kind of traction.
Arguably OS/2 was better than Windows 95, but MS spent a billion $ marketing it, and today OS/2 is a history footnote, if you've heard of it at all.
The more compeditive the market, the more marketing matters.