You already have the greatest game on steam, I hope one day you realize it and stop trying to be like other games.
/Flipping the script, in a complimentary way
Nope. The greatest game sells more copies. There are games with 10% of the content we have outselling us like the forest and subnautica. They aren't riddled with bugs and run like crap though or deal with voxels shafting their graphics. Once we polish our game up to be at least single A quality we will dominate them.
7 Days has a unique appeal so some players are willing to subject themselves to low quality visuals and performance issues, and deal with bugs to play it. If we were polished we'd sell 3-5x as many copies. 18 is a huge step in that direction.
Success depends on how good an idea it is, combined with how well its executed.
A great idea executed poorly will fail.
A crappy idea executed AAA will fail.
I'd say we have a great idea executed ok, about 40% with 0% being horrid and 100% being AAA perfect and we've had some pretty good success. If we could raise that execution level to 75% we'd sell double the copies, 100% would sell 10x the copies.
This is why those other games do better, they are an OK idea executed at a 80-90% level. If we can land on a single a quality maybe at roughly 70%, I'd say AA is 85% and AAA is 100% we'll be doing great. It would be very difficult to make a voxel game like ours AAA without throwing a billion dollars at it. That said, I think if we can reach 70% we'll be good.
Its great you think our game is the greatest, but most people expect better graphics, performance and no bugs from a game. So we're working towards that. 18 will be a real treat and by 19 I think we'll be smashing most survival games.
The aspect of other games we are trying to be like is performant, bug free, and nicer visuals. Fallout has great looting and we have that now, so that pursuit is nearly over. It has great NPC and story but that will be out of our reach for another game or two.