people say that its hard to stand out with a game. theyve been saying this since 2013. if you look at the vast, vast majority of games they almost try purposefully to be bad. they blatantly ignore users and entertain their own fantasies about what is fun and what is not. if you make a game that is clean, simple, straightforward and thoughtful then your game will be good. exceedingly few games manage to do this and never even tried to.

i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition

Yeah, you'll see people pointing to statistics like how many games are being released on Steam nowadays. But if you actually sort by new on Steam, and look at the quality of these games, it's 95% complete low-effort trash: gacha games, published Unreal templates with some tweaks, half-baked ideas, just stuff that no one would ever actually want to play.

If you have taste, drive, and vision, your actual competition is miniscule. Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable wall if you have the patience to climb it. And if you ever feel lost, you'll be hard pressed to find a group more ready to dispense advice than game developers.