This is not a zero sum game. Minecraft has lots of merchandising (including other video games) and has launched many youtube careers. It has created a big marke

This is not a zero sum game. Minecraft has lots of merchandising (including other video games) and has launched many youtube careers. It has created a big marketing cohort and businesses loves those. Now dwarf fortress is a more interesting beast to me. It belongs to a niche where the ratio of players to developers is very small. Those games are in perpetual betas. The biggest ones are financed by patreon and by side jobs. The meat of those games is found in the complex systems that the players can interact with. The graphics are often dry and unappealing to the mainstream audience. I recommend the grid sage games blog as an example of the dedication that those people put in their craft: www.gridsagegames.com/blog/ I don't think the big publishers are interested in this niche. Mostly designers will look at those game to study their innovations and try to replicate that in more polished games.