The games I like and are popular tend to be fruits of passion, sometimes obsession. And in most postmortem talks I watched the main creator went "I thought this would be fun, so I wanted to make a game of it" or "I liked X so I wanted to play a game with it."

In most cases it is a kind of egoistic artistic pursuit that stops at nothing until they can realize their game.

I've never heard anyone mentioning "engagement" or "AAA" or any of that MBA fluff they blabb during game presentations.