does genre fundamentally determine review ceiling for indie games, or is it more about community feedback loops?

something i keep turning over when thinking about which indie games actually accumulate review counts at scale is whether the genre itself is the limiting factor, or whether what really matters is the kind of ongoing community behavior the game produces after release... because those two things can look similar on the surface but point toward very different predictions. a narrative-heavy indie game and a roguelike can both have passionate audiences, but the roguelike player has structural reasons to return, discuss builds, compare runs, and post again, while the narrative player may finish once and feel complete. that difference in engagement pattern compounds over time in ways that show up directly in review totals. so when forecasting which games cross a threshold like 10,000 reviews, it seems like the question isn't just "is this game good" but "does this game generate the kind of repeated social interaction that produces review accumulation as a byproduct?" but here's what i'm genuinely uncertain about: are there indie games that break this pattern by building community around something other than mechanical replayability? games with active modding scenes, or ones that develop strong speedrunning cultures, or titles with ongoing content updates that pull players back into review-writing moments? those might represent a separate pathway to high review counts that doesn't depend on genre at all. curious whether people think genre is destiny here, or whether community structure is the real variable worth tracking when making predictions about which titles will actually reach that 10k mark by 2027.