And that publisher is... Steam. The trouble is even with the might of all those well-targeted customers there's still only a few thousand sales to be made - and thanks to the sudden change in the pricing of games in the last 5 years or so, you can now only make 1/10th of the money from a sale that you could before.
In my original posting I wasn't really trying to complain about the situation; just showing the facts and figures, and the ultimate conclusion of course, which is that we're not making any more of them. Probably. It is quite fun.
Clearly there's way more sales to made than thousands, it's just that it's going to be a power law distribution. There's only going to be one Minecraft (10s of millions), a handful of Super Meat Boys (million copies) or Legends of Grimrock (half a million), etc.
It seems like the more interesting question is what a developer can do to increase their likelihood of winning the indie game lottery. Besides making a good game. FTL did it by getting lots of publicity from being an early game development kickstarter success story. Legend of Grimrock had excellent graphics for a 4 man indie game, resurrected a genre that had been dead for a couple of decades, and got good launch-time reviews in a lot of big PC game publications. (I expect that the nostalgia effect was a factor both in getting the reviews in the first place, as well as in them being so positive).
In my original posting I wasn't really trying to complain about the situation; just showing the facts and figures, and the ultimate conclusion of course, which is that we're not making any more of them. Probably. It is quite fun.