Another good take on the phenomenon is (the insufferable) Taleb's discussion of "Black Swan" professions. History (from culture to natural disasters) gets defined by exceptional cases, but your own life in these professions will probably get defined by the typical case. Unfortunately, the industry is set up to stoke and profit handsomely from people mis-assessing their own chances.

The people I've known (actors and writers, mostly) who deal with this most healthily get a lot from their craft other than either outward success or personal fulfillment. There's also a community around their craft that gives them companionship, love, visibility to day jobs etc. Does that exist in the same way or indy devs? It seems like the solitary aspects of coding would work against.

Yeah and many other indies worked for 4+ years and got about 10 downloads on release, and you never hear of them.

There is a problem unique to games if you view them as software: a very narrow window of promotion.

You can gradually improve overall visibility of a regular software by working on SEO and sales. But if a game wasn't picked by the press or at least some YouTube celebrity – it's over.

This is even worse for mobile games where a few store curators decide your fate.

You may have missed the nuance in the comment you're replying to. Everyone knows that it's possible to win the lottery. But the best advice you can give is to tell people they're never going to win the lottery.

People who are super passionate about making indie games I'm going to do it regardless, so this is good advice.

If it's Pareto-distributed market winning then a lot of the same logic as to why you should do a startup – either do it because it needs to be done, or do it because you want to do it AND can endure all of the hardships, possibly because of how much you want it – should apply. Not everyone can or should do startups.

Well even though it looks like, creative fields are not split only between the top hits and the starving hopefuls.

You might not be the next star musician, but even big artists need session players, there's teaching, arranging, etc

Artists and writers can find some work in commercial endeavours.

It might not be a big market but it exists.

Wasn't Stardew Valley basically built from the earlier game Starbound?