An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My favorite example here is Kenshi. [1] It started with modest interest and within a few months it was down to literally tens of players. This is normally where somebody driven by profit would just shrug, complain, and go try something new. But they guy clearly believed in his game, kept going, and now a decade later it's an extremely popular game that still has thousands of regular players - verging on overcoming Hogwart's Legacy.
I think a lot of smaller developers are misled by things like game jams. Get a highly enthusiastic group of people in a room and the games they're going to respond well to, and the feedback they're going to give is going to be utterly worthless. What's fun to play in a highly social setting with lots of other hyper enthusiastic people, for 5 minutes at a time, does not translate at all to what people are interested in buying and playing at home.