Well-written. I also find these kinds of games to be cathartic experiences. However, I think that the few games have saturated the market, or over-saturated, if That Dragon, Cancer’s poor sales are representative[1]. I suppose that might be because viewing the content of these games is cathartic enough, but it might also be because unless one is in the industry, playing one of these games once, or once per personal loss, is enough, and thankfully sudden losses like the author’s are still rare.
And yet, that one play through could offer a tremendous benefit in learning to cope with a heartbreaking loss. I wonder if there's room yet in society for prescribing video games like this, a la https://www.thestar.com/amp/opinion/star-columnists/2018/10/...
Trivial entertainment generally sells better than serious explorations of an important theme, regardless of the medium. Six of the ten top-grossing movies in 2018 were adaptations of superhero comics; several Oscar-nominated movies have barely recouped their costs.
Part of the reason for poor sales of a "play once and done" game is people can just watch someone do a "Let's Play" on YouTube and experience the (in most cases) linear narrative without having to pay.
Views on a Let's play are not equal to lost sales. Most of those people wouldn't have been exposed to the game in the first place and plenty of viewers go on to buy the game after watching a let's play anyways, even for linear story experiences. It's practically impossible to come up with an exact figure of how many sales a let's play drives, vs. how many it prevents, but for many games exposure through YouTube has gotten the word out to an audience many times larger than what a developer with a small marketing budget could have managed otherwise.
1 http://www.thatdragoncancer.com/thatdragoncancer/2016/3/24/o...