I was wondering, what’s up with that? You guys probably have noticed that 5 out of 10 games that we see everyday on the WIP session are horror games. Is that a ridiculously popular genre? Or is it just “easy” to start with that genre?
What are your thoughts on that?
I’d say that it’s because it is a popular genre. Developing a horror game that is actually scary is definitely not easy. I actually began working on mine sometime during the first week of Unreal Engine’s release. But I feel like there are so many “horror” games appearing especially in the WIP section that if I were to share what I was making, it wouldn’t be unique or special anymore. It has actually made me decide to push the project in a different direction. Regardless of how many there are, some of the projects I do see in WIP are actually impressive! 
I personally think everybody tries to create such games as it’s super easy to create them -> think about “Slender”. Something like that can be easily made within some few days (as long as you are a good artist)
Well, horror games are relatively simple, similar to puzzle games. I have been wanting to make a horror game where you are trapped inside a extremely massive building that randomly shifts every few minutes, and the goal is to get out, but I simply don’t have the time 
They require much less art assets, due to very dark environments, and usually there’s no characters in scene. Makes things much easier to develop alone.
No please! Don’t give people such ideas! Steam is filled with terrible 3 dollar worthy horror titles that are being done with 5 asset and a Free Unity Store model for a monster already! 
But really, it’s just assumed to be easy. WIP forum section really got good ones though. You must see Steam horror games in early access… God. (Not saying all of them are bad, like 90% of them maybe.)
That is not just for horror games. Steam is filled with everything; and will only get worse.
By 2016 having a game on Steam won’t make you any money already, unless you have strong marketing workforce like the bigger have. Valve see the money Google and Apple make with the flood gate open.
They now are doing the same.
It’s because the junk you find clogging up steam is dead quick and easy to put together and requires no skill. Just set up a first person template project, add some flashlight code you can find online, throw together a few copy/paste levels using marketplace assets and shroud them in darkness to hide the lazy design and shoddy construction. For bonus points, arbitrarily pad your game length by forcing the player to trudge about looking for keys to open doors.
Finally, just script a creepy girl model to appear and disappear and you can shovel that junk onto Steam Greenlight and charge $10 for the “privilege”. You’re bound to get a few suckers willing to gamble that money on your game, and you’d only need a few to turn a profit, albeit a modest one.
Problem is, your mind needs to be focused on realism when it comes to horror games. If assets are terrible, low poly, used way too much, your mind can’t get the feeling out, which is this is just a game.
It’s just funny how those terrible games get their games greenlighted.
I really wish Steam wasn’t opening the flood gate I want it to be just like the UE4 marketplace, where if it gets onto the marketplace, you are pretty much guaranteed to make a decent amount of money.
A “horror game” is certainly easier to make than most other types of games. You can have very simplistic gameplay, which consists of walking around, picking up objects, opening doors and having a flickering flashlight, with loud noises and spooky things teleporting around when the player enters a trigger volume. Anyone can learn how to program that, especially with blueprints. And I think this draws in people who want to tell a story more than make an interesting or fun game.
Another reason horror games might be popular these days is down to the popularity of internet “celebrities” and streamers and such, who do silly faces and scream and stuff like that when playing these games, which goes down well with the audience. I’ve run into a number of games such as these that are only made to appeal to a few select youtube personalities, with obvious “easter egg” references to them within the games themselves.
As for steam being filled with rubbish, the greenlight system is fairly easily exploited and not only by people who don’t know better or don’t have the skills to make actually good games, but also by scam artists, who deliberately make loads of awful games and try to push dozens of them through the system. When the cost of development is maybe a week of your time and a couple of asset packs, you’re going to struggle not to make a profit off of it. Price the games at under 5 dollars and people won’t think too hard about parting with their money and probably wont deal with the hassle of getting a refund. Which is similar behaviour to what you see on app stores, a thousand shallow clones of popular game types released constantly, because quantity works pretty well if you’re not able to create anything of quality.
Meh. People with low expectations are the problem. And with that, I mean very -very- low expectations. So low that they let everything go okay.
True. Too many people think that it is just enough that someone put a game onto Greenlight to justify giving them support and voting for it. You can easily tell when a project is hampered by being low budget (or even no budget) and when the developer is just lazily repackaging pre-made assets to turn a quick profit. One will improve with time and support, the other will not. Sadly, the default response is always “hey let’s give them some support so it will get better”.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do to stop people blindly voting everything through, so we can expect to see a lot more reskins of UnitZ appearing in the near future. I’m just surprised we’ve not seen the fps example game being given a 5 minute rename and chucked on there yet.
Because it’s C++ and modding it requires some knowledge you won’t get from watching a 1-hour youtube video 
IMO, Horror is an easy to develop genre effectively. If you have the right music, atmosphere and lighting, you don’t even need an antagonist to make the game scary. You can just hint at an unseen enemy and that’s enough.
The enemy… is YOURSELF! O_O
I think we all are getting a pattern here. Maybe if we all work together, we can make a 5 dollar horror game and be rich! O_O
Survival or horror is a popular genre and people make them because people buy them not because they are easy to make.
Being unique or special is not really a selling point as people will buy based on wanting to continue their gaming experience and buy these games like someone would buy rock and roll and not country and western music.
I’m down with that!!!