Doing a Lot with a Little
In order: Papers, Please - Snakebird - Her Story - Blek - Towerfall - TIS100 - Gone Home
Here are some recent-ish games with very strong (even ground-breaking) designs that were also developed in a relatively sane and financially responsible way. These games also found supportive commercial audiences without overwhelming marketing spending (with possible exception of Snakebird, but hey, Blek was a late bloomer too!)
In my opinion, if you are involved in creating independent commercial games, you should either A) learn some lessons from these games or B) build sandbox toys. In my opinion everything else (including our two big content-heavy projects Overland and Night In The Woods) are not the least-risky ventures in the current market, regardless of their overall quality.
Life isn’t all about minimizing risk though, and remember, any reading of any market is inevitably going to be a year or two behind the curve by the time you actually finish your project. And as always, there are lots of influential and satisfying forms of game dev that are decidedly not commercial!
UPDATE: A commenter reminded me that I egregiously omitted Desert Golfing from this list! Prune would be a v good mobile candidate too.