Yeah, we make more casual, all audiences type games, and I’m pretty sure that makes our issues worse. The landscape for these types of games has turned hyper-competitive in the worst ways - it’s all about having the most clickable images and metadata, not about making the most fun game.
A couple years ago our games were in the tens of thousands of concurrent players, now we’re lucky if the most popular one reaches 2000 concurrent due to discovery being dramatically worse for us. I’m sure someone reading this will think “thousands of concurrent players!! why are you complaining??” but the unfortunate truth is that 2000 concurrent is barely enough to keep a games studio of 3 people working full-time afloat.
Releasing a game or even two every year is already difficult but something we have to do with how discovery has been working. Only getting stable impressions for the first few months makes it 10x more difficult still. Making a more niche game, like the ones you mention, is a massive risk for our small studio, because it is impossible to know what long-term discovery will look like in that niche.