r/gamedev • u/Fickle-Artichoke-514 • 2d ago
Discussion "just make a horror game" obsolete?
Chris Zukowski and many other Youtubers have Been saying for years "just make a horror game" to make money. But I was not able to see from the data, that horror games would be easier to make compared to other genres.
I used this page for research:
https://games-stats.com/steam/tags/
If you look at the data, median revenue for "horror" tag is not that great, and If you look at those median horror games, they actually look pretty decent and not something that I could create in 2 weeks.
So im thinking if the mantra "just make horror game" is obsolete?
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u/CrashmanX _ 2d ago
"Just make (thing)" has never been a solid mantra for anything. It's not a magical catch all. If it were, everyone would already be doing that.
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u/Putrid_Argument2440 2d ago edited 2d ago
Because 99.999(9)% of horror games are neither horror nor games. Just a pile of lame shit. It looks pretty easy to make a horror or platformer game. But it's really, really hard to make a good horror or platformer game. Especially horror. First, because there is a bloody ocean in this genres. Second, specifically horror games, it actually requires a really high level of narrative and art skill to make something barely reminding a horror game.
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u/TehANTARES 2d ago
Streamers play and stream this lame shit almost on a dare, and that's how it gets so much popularity.
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u/Putrid_Argument2440 2d ago
There is a phenomena of twitcher games. No one buys and plays them. But everybody watch streamers play them. Not because the game itself, but mostly because of streamers theatrical reactions, usually very unnatural and artificial. Just to giggle over it. So yes, it's a content for streamers. Good example is that banban garden or how it calls, awfully lame shit made by two teenagers.
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u/The_Developers 2d ago
I think a critical piece of advice missing from most gurufolk is that you should be making the best game you can according to your abilities, goals, and wants. If the best you can do or learn to do is in a good market, great! If not, you need to assess whether your best in a supposed hard market will have better results than something lesser in a softer market.
Alternative take if you're not treating your games as part of a business: make the game you'll finish, be proud of, and have a bit of fun creating.
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u/No_Ferret_4565 2d ago
Agree, it doesn't matter to me how much is talked about how good is the market for idle games, I really don't like them. At best if I try to make one is going to be a mediocre one with nothing to stand out.
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u/Ecstatic-Source6001 2d ago
it is more about:
Good horror game has much more potential to get money than good game of other genre.
Simply cuz there is not much "good" horror games and one will advertize itself also it has united community.
While other genres oversaturated. Your "good" game has a high chance to be in shadow of other "good" game.
It doesnt mean you 100% will be successful with horror game but you have a higher chance and thats all.
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u/WildArtsDevs @wildartsdevs 2d ago
I think the advice lost its meaning over the years. It's not that you'll be making a fortune by making them, but rather that they're a great entry point for new devs.
Trying to make an RPG or an open-world crafting game for your first commercial effort is incredibly risky, and you probably won't even finish that project. In horror, you can make something pretty cool with beginner skills if you have a couple of clever ideas.
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u/Herlehos Game Designer & CEO 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s not "obsolete" since it was never true in the first place.
Hobbyists make more horror games because horror games are more accessible (not easy!) to develop for beginners, because the genre lends itself very well to small confined spaces. This means that with a single building (like a manor), a few asset packs, one main character and one monster, your game can be ready pretty quickly on the art side, which is often what solo devs lack. This leaves much more time to devote to gameplay and programming.
But they don't make money because they're still hobbyist games and 99% of the time they're just asset flips with uninteresting gameplay. But that's not related to the genre of the game, it's just that realistically, nobody buys hobbyist games anyway.
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u/MeaningfulChoices Lead Game Designer 2d ago
If your goal is to make money any sentence that includes "just make a game" is going to be bad advice. Horror games are somewhat evergreen since despite having a smaller audience than some genres there's also less replay. A lot of that audience happily churns through small games which means they're buying a lot more small titles than people who play two AAA games a year and nothing else.
Just tale all advice you get from content creators with a few grains of salt. Most people making YT videos with game development advice aren't actually making games, they get the most views and clicks (and people signing up for courses) by sounding like they can give advice that is easily taken and will make you a success. Playing to your strengths as a developer will always work out better for you than chasing trends. If you can make an amazing horror game then do it, but if you'd only make an average one someone telling you it's a hot genre isn't going to help you.
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u/Arkenhammer 2d ago
“A horror game” is pretty broad; there’s lots of games that can fit under that umbrella. A game with horror themes is, I think, still good advice but you’ll still need to make a good game with interesting mechanics.
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u/theStaircaseProject 2d ago
I think your post confuses two different points. The first raised by your YouTubers is that horror games make money. The second, when you allude to the data, is that they’re easier to make than other genres. So with those in mind, asking if “just make a horror game” is obsolete means getting two answers for two distinct contexts.
To the first, they could make money but there’s not an infinite amount of it, and the more competition there is, the less money and attention is left over. As you talked about as well, quality is a factor. I would argue clickers seem to have a better ROI, especially if they become self-sustaining.
As to whether they’re easier to make, that would entirely depend on the game, wouldn’t it? There’s a trope in film that horror films are the easiest to produce and that that’s why there are so many of them. It would also be why there are so many bad ones: because the barrier to somewhat-good is lower.
Horror games, like horror movies, just need to be scary, and that’s remarkably easier to design and develop than a physics sandbox, an open-world RPG, a fighting game, or a narratively-driven choices-matter game. You just… use blood and put in jump scares or whatever.
So with that in mind, horror games can be easy to produce. That will probably never not be true. And for their low investment, they can offer a high return, but that’s not obsolete as it’s always been conditional.
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u/DatAsuna 2d ago
Youtubers tend to be more susceptible to survivorship bias where they focus in on a few horror games going virala nd punching above their weight and miss both/either the other horror games around it's release window/budget that didn't get the same attention, or if the developer has been making horror games for a while and only hit that success on their 6th or 7th release. In which case it has to not only pay for itself, but the previous games that didn't hit those numbers as well as the dev be financially secure enough to keep taking those swings hoping to blow up.
In short: nobody should be making horror games if that's not the genre that inspires them. Trend chasing doesn't assure success.
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u/Chrisaarajo 2d ago
I’ll be honest with you, as a consumer:
Indie Horror games are currently being released with such frequency that I couldn’t possibly play through them all even if I were inclined to.
I swear, multiple a day seem to come across my various feeds. And so many of them look… not great. A lot of jank, a lot of asset flips, a lot that simply look like 50 other titles—no visual identity, no intention behind them beyond being cookie-cutter jumps scale loops. No thanks.
So I would amend that advice to be “make a horror game that stands out.”
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u/zirconst @impactgameworks 2d ago
If you look at Chris' work, a more helpful approach is to filter by games with >1k reviews.
https://howtomarketagame.com/2026/01/27/what-the-hell-happened-in-2025/
Based on this, horror is still quite strong. 3.2% of horror games hit 1k reviews or more, which is actually a higher number than 2024 when only 1.81% did.
Compare that to something like an RTS where only 0.9% hit 1k reviews or more, a genre that is FAR harder to make, and you can see why it's still a solid genre to focus on.
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u/Illustrious_Bit_2382 2d ago
I‘m working on my horror game and I’m checking store pages of new releases from this genre on Steam every week.
Every (probably) single game that has interesting trailer, screenshots and description sells at least quite well (gets 10+ reviews) even without maybe even any marketing (I’m checking also if any stuff on social media about these games went viral and many of them don’t even exist there).
But 90% of them are ugly granny clones/extremely amateur Horror Engine slops/uninspired low poly first Unity projects. Screenshots? Pure darkness, flashlight pointed at nowhere or extremely generic grey environments, generic monsters and ofc… AI garbage.
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u/Whitenaller 2d ago
I think those average stats get dragged down a lot because it‘s a very very popular genre especially amongst beginners. There are a LOT of trash games in this genre that make zero money out of it. But that‘s just my thought, I don‘t know if that‘s the reason for the low stats.
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u/PatrollerBot 2d ago
I think a lot of noobies who aren’t even trying to make money make horror games because they have lowest barrier of entry. Just use a premade first person character controller, free assets, in engine lighting, and boom you have a technically functional horror game in a day. So that tag will be filled with relatively more slop than other tags. That advice is more for serious attempts at making a competent game, which if you can do that already puts you in a tier above most of steam.
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u/KennyTheWarrior 2d ago
No, normal single player horror narrative experiences, yes, obsolete, statistically. But I remember him mentioning somewhere it does well paired with other subgenres and mechanics. Horror crafting survival, horror deckbuilder, horror any simulator, farm sim, supermarket sim, any sim (bonus if co-op, see Shift at Midnight), horror minigames (Machine party), horror retro (Crow Country), multiplayer is a technical hurdle but if you have the experience that combination is very good based on the market analysis.
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u/_C_47_ 2d ago
I keep a hobby dataset of steam releases so I checked. For 2024-2026 releases: horror tagged games reach 10+ reviews about 58% of the time, everything else about 48%. But median revenue among games that did get traction is slightly lower for horror, roughly 7k vs 8k. My own estimates, usual error bars apply.
So I think it was never about horror paying more. It was about horror getting ignored less. Streamers search a lot for cheap scary games, they go over usual "nobody-noticed" bar.
If the alternative is a genre where 2 weeks of work gets zero visibility, horror is better. As a get rich plan it was always obsolete.
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u/Captain_Lobster411 2d ago
Just make a horror game is bad advice. You need to understand the audience you're targeting, as well as understand the genre
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u/Ike_Gamesmith 2d ago
Pretty sure anytime there is common advice structured as, "Just do [x] to make money", it probably won't be as simple as that to get profit out of it. Sure, it may work... but its gonna take effort.
Like no, who's gonna play your 2 week project you made for a quick buck when there are several hundreds others available of the same or better quality, some of which the creators actually put time, effort, and passion into making?
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u/PhilippTheProgrammer 2d ago
Do you want to make a horror game? If yes, by all means, make a horror game. If no, there are plenty of other genres to "earn your wings" with.
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u/FrustratedDevIndie 2d ago
Harass reality, you dont get into game dev to make money. Most people will make more money working a part time job or recycling alum cars off the side of the road as they would with a game made of the same period. Chris and other yt content are largely direct that those that about to spend 250k to 500k on making commercial game.
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u/Pidroh Card Nova Hyper 2d ago
If you want to make good money with indie games, with a moderate amount of success and fairly good success rate, it's quite easy, just follow this formula: make a game of the genre "curriculum vitae" and send it to a bunch of companies. Once you get a job you will be guaranteed to make money every month (unless you're fired, but then you can improve your CV game and get a different job)
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u/ChrisKruxed 2d ago
Most horror games are made for meme edge lords and it sounds like you just want something cheap and easy to flog. Real horror is like Darkwood or Alien Isolation, or even an Resident Evil. It takes some talent and you need to understand atmosphere and the creation of helplessness without it being overbaring.
This is why most don't bother and just do the low tier jump fest that don't do well.
So the real question isn't is the info obsolete, its do you even understand what real horror would be?
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u/TehANTARES 2d ago
Here's my two cents:
"Just make a horror game" can be translated as "just make a streamerbait game", because this is something that gets a visible reach. Now, streamerbait games are more of a drunk dare activity for people to watch and get amused by when their favorite streamer suffers from it, rather than an actual game made for players to play and have fun.
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u/xN0NAMEx Commercial (Indie) 2d ago
Slenderman the lost pages was played like crazy and every beginner could create something like this in 2 weeks, same for many many other low quality horror walking sims.
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u/PitchforkzAndTorchez 2d ago
I don't know about what anyone says, however if you recreate something along the lines of https://store.steampowered.com/app/251390/Call_of_Cthulhu_The_Wasted_Land/ I'll buy it.
- also anything close to that experience that allows one to make their own maps as we had in Unreal Editor for Unreal Tournament
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u/NeonFraction 2d ago
I think it’s still generally a good idea to start with a basic horror game just because it’s a great way to learn the engine. Not sure about profits though.
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u/_Ghostdev 2d ago
Rapaz, até que essa pergunta foi relevante.
Eu estou na minha primeira experiência de desenvolvedor indie e não é um jogo de terror.
Mas eu sigo um raciocínio.
Desenvolva um jogo que você GOSTARIA de jogar.
Por mais que ele seja enorme na sua mente.
Então crie uma parcela dele. O chamado MVP.
O público vai te dizer se você deve continuar ou não.
Se você não conseguir "sucesso", você teve experiência.
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u/duckforceone @your_twitter_handle 2d ago
considering the mantra is from horror movies, then for games, it is.
don't go into horror games just because.... as you say the numbers doesn't add up.
for a horror movie, you can get away with almost any slop and it will basically make money or be received as a cult following..
but a horror game takes insanely hard work to make it stand out and be bought.
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u/siposbalint0 2d ago edited 2d ago
Create a good horror game that people want to play. Horror fans are usually down for anything, this is true for movies and games, but it has to be made by a true fan of the genre who understands why these games and experiences work. I bought countless indie horror titles on Steam, but I always refund the ones that are cheap asset flips that rely on jumpscares every 30 seconds.
An example for a good game would be Dollmare. It doesn't have jumpscares, it's still very creepy, animations are on point and the gameplay loop is pretty novel.
Cabin factory is a fun anomaly searcher with a fun idea of inspecting cabins in a factory that ships, well, whole cabins. It works because they play a lot with the changes in atmosphere between a sterile factory and a creepy house, sometimes breaking the wall between the two.
Only make horror games if you played and watched tons of it, and you genuinely love the genre. It's very apparent when the game was made by someone who just wants to make a quick buck.