In the end it all comes down to money and time.
You need a lot of both to make people know about your game… Plus luck.
If you have none, a publisher could help for a cut.
Nowadays most of the time if you publish a game on your own it is dead on arrival.
I wouldn’t publish it without already built community around it, ever, won’t sell. There’s too many games released every day. People won’t notice yours without marketing.
This is why it’s important for indies to identify an undeserved niche and target that niche (small) demographic of players before going wild developing anything; they are people whose in need for what you’re going to offer and once they hear about your game it’s easier to build a community.
Problem is, with the flood of games released now everyday, good luck trying to identify any undeserved genre *
Another thing to consider is what types of games the AAA industry is developing and making sure none of the upcoming releases for next 3~5 years overlap with what you’re doing. If any AAA company release a similar product within the same release window of yours, they’re pretty much going to kill and bury your game for the simple fact that they have access to strong marketing budget, even if yours release first. This happens all the time, really.
- Different regional markets have different niches, some studios find success making games for their local market instead of going global with Steam/AppStore where competition is much harder to overcome.