I’ve read lots of negative posts regarding Slenderman games, people suggesting that devs making slender games should make something more original, change the character etc.
Now I know some of you are learning game dev to get a job in the industry or already work in the industry but remember some people are working for themselves, or aim to do so. Slenderman is popular and from a business point of view is very attractive. Putting slender in the game and the title gives the game a franchise for free that’s pretty popular.
At some point in your career you will probably have to sacrifice what you want to make for what you have to make to continue being a game developer for a living.
Yeah, there’s always going to be people who complain about originality before going back to their Call of Duty 5. You can happily ignore them, originality is overrated.
However… “Slender” doesn’t buy you into a franchise. A franchise gives you a brand that speaks to quality and ideally helps you to more easily make sales. I’ve done no research, but “Slender” as a brand suggests amateur-grade quality and as a result I doubt it’ll help you make sales. You’re not buying into a franchise, you’re just jumping on a meme bandwagon. At the same time, it means you’re directly competing with everyone else who’s using the idea - you’re essentially picking an already saturated niche.
So I don’t buy the idea that “Slender” in and of itself makes business sense. However, that’s kind of irrelevant. If it’s what you want to make then go ahead and have fun making it, and pay no more attention to the naysayers than you do to the people calling you unoriginal.
Directly competing with other “amateur grade” games and making something that stands out wouldn’t be too difficult.
I disagree with the business sense, I think a slender game done well would get a certain amount of publicity and that’s not something to be taken for granted. People like familiarity, hence why sequels are popular.
I guess it’s about timing. After a 100 bad slender clones people probably won’t look at yours because it’s another Slenderman game. But the first guy who made a slender clone on mobile had good sales if I remember correctly.
People buy sequels to games they’ve already enjoyed. People are familiar with The Price is Right, but you don’t see the video game flying off the shelves. Also, while AgentParsec’s “Slender” gained some publicity, thanks to Kotaku and Toonami, I don’t know of any Slender-based game that has actually made money (including his).
SlenderMan on android has over 4 million downloads, that’s quite a lot. It’s a free game though but with these numbers ads should also bring in a pretty penny.
I’d written a longish response, but I’ll just stick to this: you’re right that the publicity can’t be taken for granted, it in fact can’t be relied upon at all.
I deffinetly go a bit angry reading the negative replies in other slender threads of the new developers. I just think they’re making those slender games just for
“fun”, they create their own Slender version game with a totally different game mechanics, different style, different scripting methods which change the performance or graphics, they do their own modeling or they just try to copy a game with a different point of view, like I do with my “Entity” game, I just make my game for fun an i want to show to people what i can do.