I would resist the urge to give too much credit to luck and marketing when it comes to indie game success. Notable outliers like Bastion, Sword + Sworcery, and FTL were all stunning executions. The FTL team did almost no marketing, but released a product that spoke directly to the target market of desktop gamers. Passionate people played it, liked it, and told others.
It's hard to achieve that level of success because it's hard to execute on that level of excellence with a concept that resonates with an audience.
There are other paths to financial success, surely, where monied studios can pump out derivative crap with in-app purchases and virtual goods. I guess the talent there comes from being able to tune experiences designed for shallow addiction, like food scientists creating the cheese dust for Doritos. But I don't think that's the only path.
Slight addendum for your slight (and correct) corrections :) Both games had been in self-funded development a long time and had achieved some degree of critical acclaim before Kickstarter and signing on with WB, respectively. I might argue that their previous work had created the conditions for them to earn those victories and reap the benefits.
For Bastion, it's probably good to be explicit that WB did not provide them funding. The benefit to Supergiant was access to advertising and speeding their way through the publishing process for Xbox Live Arcade. A significant victory they sought out and earned, to be sure.
In the case of FTL, the success of the Kickstarter may have generated some additional buzz because of how much they beat their goal. But the reason they beat their goal was that their game had already been discovered and appreciated (even in its early form) by a community of people passionate about games. Without organized marketing on their part, aside from showing the game to many of their colleagues.
It's hard to achieve that level of success because it's hard to execute on that level of excellence with a concept that resonates with an audience.
There are other paths to financial success, surely, where monied studios can pump out derivative crap with in-app purchases and virtual goods. I guess the talent there comes from being able to tune experiences designed for shallow addiction, like food scientists creating the cheese dust for Doritos. But I don't think that's the only path.