On the other hand, sometimes it's very much not chance. Take stardew valley. It's not like Barone hit some sort of jackpot with his game. It really is head and shoulders above the competition, and that appears to be entirely due to his hard work on it. My evidence for this is that after I played Stardew Valley I was thirsty for more similar farming games, so I played or looked at every single one on steam (there's only about a dozen or so that qualify) and none of them are half the game that stardew valley is. If there were some diamond in the rough, stardew valley-quality game out there that through happenstance never went viral I would have hoped to find it, but no, there really isn't.