Thank you for taking your time to write this postmortem. Game marketing is indeed very tough from what I gathered so far. I’m yet to release my first game on Steam, so I find these insights very valuable.
If you don’t mind answering, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently about this game? Would you change the gameplay or artstyle in some way to make it more appealing to the wide audience? Or try to market it differently? EDIT: I guess you already gave an answer in “The bad” part, but it’s still interesting to hear what you’d do if you tried to optimize the game for better visibility.
For what it’s worth, you made a really cool and well-polished game. Even if it didn’t perform well financially, at least you had fun making it and learned new things. And the fact that you finished it is a very big milestone in itself - only a handful of games actually make it to the full release.
Do you already have the next game in mind? :-)
Regardless, I wish the best of luck in any future projects of yours!