Oh having things like that is important. So is word of mouth. But all that is meaningless if barely anyone knows about it.
Warframe is one such game. Due to having great community and being BEST game in its class it was steadily growing. But rly slowly. Too slowly for Acti shareholders.
What gave WF its massive popularity spike is commercials as well. Its just that after destiny 2 fiasco it was that word of mouth that turned Acti commercials to WF ones.
After all if every video about D2 was filled by WF ppl telling you to just play WF since its better and free it turns those videos intro commercials.
But that only works if competition fails. After all, crap like fallout 76 sells in milions just due to commercials.Whats worse we have 2 great game above us that are a direct competition.The only competition to WF was D2 and maybe PoE since both are grind to death type of game but thats it.
Edit:due to all the crap with blizz sacking pro league we are in the position that D2 was. If someone right now put a comment promoting LoL or DotA saying to not play this game due to bad practice activision did we cant dismiss em. And even tho this is rly benign compared to what D2 did our competition is fierce.