He failed because he did not think of his target audience for a porn game
Did he?
Or are you just not the target audience?
Some games have a niche target. Male audience isn't the target for all games, that's too general and we know it's bollocks, no one should target an audience that wide there are just too many tastes to be able to make it work.
At most you could grab a few thousand but you'll never grab them all.
if you want to make game with various fetish content (futa, swinging, ntr), you leave it up to player to "control" what is happening.
Again, bollocks. Those are main kinks that devs base their entire games around.
NTR is a genre in and of itself. Games with futa tend to have main characters in that role like Inner Growth. Hard for the player to control what is happening when the MC is the futa.
Then you have games like Shattered based around sissification. The target audience is whoever is into that kink.
We go right back around this circle to players assuming every game is aimed at them when that just isn't the case.
The dev of A Clever Name said it best. He had multiple people trying to tell him how to make his game and he told them straight, he is making the game he wants to make. If they want to play it, great, if not also great, they can find something better suited for them.
Plenty of devs have tried chasing the money and listening to their audience. The problem is once you start they all want different things and it ends up a messy clusterfuck of nonsense. That's where a loty of those abandoned tags come from. They start out making the game they want to make, listen to players like you to try and win your money then end up absolutely hating what they are doing because it's not what they wanted.
Regardless of content now sooner or later the player base for games pick up. If a dev manages to complete a game they also have more chance of pulling in paying players for their second game because trust is built.
If dev has a rep of "finishing" games, which most people don't like, I don't think that there is more chances for next game be more popular, if dev himself does not think where was his problem. It's not audience problem, that they don't enjoy the game - it's dev problem.
Some series on netflix or amazom releases a season, which was disliked by many people and lost a lot of viewers through the season. If they will make second season of same content - will they get popular magically?
You're comparing a TV show that takes millions to keep running to games people can make on a budget and serve entirely different purposes.
Pointless comparison.
I'll bite though.
Dev of Terminus Reach launched a completed game. It was niche as fuck because his girls are all either old, monster or alien. He doesn't do "pretty". By mid way through his second game he'd picked up a lot of steam player wise. Now he's on his third and he's doing quite well for himself.
The problem with this game isn't it being disliked, the problem here is no fucker knows about it.
24 pages of comments for a game this old because the dev won't shill himself like most do.
See ALL games have an audience. Just because it isn't YOU doesn't mean the audience isn't there.
It's arrogant as all fuck to think games should cater to you.
