My game's poor performance @Steam Next Fest

Hello guys,
First post here, and yet another rant for an indie game that has failed miserably, or at least is about to, if something doesn't change.

Long story short, the Steam Next Fest is about to close and our game has gone mostly unnoticed or unappreciated.

The only one to put the final blame on is me, the project manager: like all indies, I had thought that my game could offer something attractive. I believed it - and who knows why I still believe it - despite all the negative signals I was receiving. I deliberately underestimated them all, believing that one day or another, little by little, word of mouth would do something. While I suspected the low feedback was due to the game, I had no idea about how to improve it further. I upgraded the team, reskinned the game, put in as much content as we could, did some intense bugfixing, had care for the tutorial and interfaces to guide the player, and many other things. It wasn't enough.

The followers went up on twitter but they never exploded, same for the other social networks and wishlists. Those who complimented us were always the same. Although the game was visibly polished, no screenshot ever hit 50 likes, no word of mouth ever really triggered. The social media manager worked hard to spread material everywhere, yet we didn't have an effect.

During the Next Fest the game averaged 2-3 concurrent players the entire time. No topics on the board, except someone to report a technical problem, but no comments on the game. The average match time of the players was 10 minutes. Friends who streamed it during matches suffered from several design mistakes we made. In particular, we made one area too much boring, and another one too much frustrating. All things that we have now fixed and put online, but the train is gone. It wasn't a full release for sale, but it performed poor in terms of appreciation.

The game was funded by a publisher, the budget spent so far is almost 100K USD - obviously I feel responsible and I wish he could get the money back asap. When you're too much inside your game, as a developer, it becomes difficult to balance the experience for the average player, hence if something is too difficult, boring, poorly explained or non-immersive, that's enough to stop the show. The few feedback we collected have cleared up many mistakes we did, and we would also know how to fix them to keep on trying. The issue now is that we need more funds, and a crowdfunding would probably fail, therefore I don't know what to do. It's a dark and stormy night.

Thanks to those who have read.