Any hope for Indie developers?

Hi Everyone I am new to this forum and hoping to add and gain from the community. As the topic says "Any hope for Indie developers"? I have been a game developer for about 2 years now and have come to realise that the number of indie developers have increased drastically. This had lead to lots of game templates been sold in market places, hence that lead to lots of duplicate games been released in the stores hence leading to an increase in number of games. No matter how good your game is, without exposure it will get lost in the avalange of domant games in the stores Without marketing, it becomes difficult to get a good game boost Not many will agree with me on this point but sometimes you need LUCK. The guy that did Color Switch was the first guy I met in buildbox forum long before his game was released. The story on how his game came to be popular was both good game play and a bit of luck through multiple connections. I have seen lots of non interesting games that are doing so well and most are paid advert hence they tend to get about a million downloads If a thousand developers each release a very good game today: Now only 1% may likely get featured. Maybe a few more may end up in the front page of each category. What happens to the rest? Maybe 5% of the rest may have funds to invest in marketing Maybe another 5% would have a friend that has lots of followers in social media hence showcasing it there and getting some boost What hope does the rest of us have? Are there any strategies we need to look at to help with exposure? Most youtubers I have seen with lots of followers tends to only demo trending games Is ASO really still works? Now a days, Apple reject games using trending keywords even when your game relates to it, while Google ONLY rejects when you try to update your game Observation I have observed that when something crazy starts trending like Fidget Spinner, a lot of developers rename their game to fidget spinner even when the game play does not depict a fidget spinning Influencers appears to have some sort of impact on game becoming trending but you must know them or pay a lot Final thought A lot of developers have dropped along the way while some keep having hope for one break-through like me I hope to gain something from your comments, as that would help me do better.