The Curse of Yandere Simulator Fan Games 

Want to see more deep dives into unusual media? Video Games About 9/11 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-D5GQCHjtimg.html Entertainment Made By Cults ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nq2_xcTdhI8.html Corrections: 1. Sorry to jackboog21, his game is still in development! Take a look. gamejolt.com/games/yandere-simulator-2d/88097 2. For Apeis and Shortcake, forgot to use they/them pronouns. Sorry about that

Remember kids: don't start drama. Just make your protagonist wear a sombrero.

As a Mexican, Mexican school simulator is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time

as a person who is not a game developer, for some reason this video makes me want to make a yandere simulator. it’s like a siren’s call

i don't know why, but Tumblr accidentally making a game where you commit hate-crimes is so hilarious

i love how the original game is SO cursed everything it touches just crumbles. yandere sim really is something that should be studied

in the end, i can't believe that the least controversial game ended up being the mexico stereotype school simulator

from what im getting, most of the games got shut down because it either A. Associated with Yansim B. Had drama/controversy C. They didnt realize just how much effort they had to put in D.(kind of relates to A) Yandev insulted the game, guilt tripping the creators with his financial support

Maybe my humor is just fucked up but "the State of Limerance" inadvertently becoming a game about bullying minority characters is the funniest shit I've ever heard.

I love how there’s all this drama and then Mexican School Simulator just existing peacefully in all it’s beautiful glory as it deserves to lol

Basically you shouldn't rely completely on volunteers. More than half of the Yandree Sim games failed because of volunteers getting angry. Volunteers are good in all, but you need workers too.

31:48 Yandev suggesting someone else's coding is bad is extremely funny.

my toxic trait is thinking that I could probably make a better game with zero experience

Turns out, seemingly underage girls going on a murder frenzy to go after a guy doesn't have the best target audience

So basically, try to avoid drama, don't compare your game with Yandere Simulator, do not release your game half finished and expect it to be popular, do not make drama videos on your channel when developing, be ready for lots of obstacles while developing, expect developing a game to be very hard, actually finish your game, try your hardest to get actual volunteers who don't ruin the whole thing or start drama, focus on positivity instead of attacking people, and your Yandere Simulator fangame is good to go! Edit: And do NOT make your project out of spite. Edit: I never said that everything made out of spite can't be a success, I meant that making your project out of spite, is too unnecessary. Not only that, but it will just bring more drama into your project.

I'll never be over Love Letter, literally all they had to do was be better people than YanDev which is an extremely low bar yet they ended up significantly worse than him.

You know it's a crazy rabbit hole when throughout the entire video Paper Will sounds like he's trying to rush through a story because he really needs to go to the bathroom yet there's still an hour of story

I’ll say this. My friend has been spending two years on his own YanSim game which is being made on Unreal engine. Yet when I asked as to why he wouldn’t showcase it on RU-vid, much less have a Patreon, and he stated this. “I’ve observed that other YanSim games die rather fast when they get publicity. My goal is to not show the game off, and or get money via a Patreon as that feels like stealing. It’s best for me to have this project a secret until it’s 98% finished. In which then I can show it as its own game inspired by YanSim.” I do like his concept of mental illness, very little rivals, very diverse cast. Original assets and all. I think it might go well, even after two years of him working on it.

The fact that Yandev messaged multiple game creators of (sometimes not even spite based) fangames expecting them to take their original work down because it “threatened his income” (made on patreon for a game he won’t ever finish) or JUST because it affected his popularity and threatened to take the spotlight off him for one single second, even using threats of suicide and financial ruin, makes me think mayyyybe his game never being finished isn’t totally other people’s fault

Now the actual game is failing because of what the dev did. Another game to add to this list

the new record for shortest development time goes to ME while watching this vid i felt like i could make my own yandere sim game with an interesting concept, so decided i would make my own concepts after i finished the vid after it was done i opened up clip studio, got up to get a soda, then by the time i came back lost all motivation. new shortest development time for this genre is about 2 minutes and 47 seconds

These projects, ironically enough, are trying to kill their rivals just like their protagonists, except no one wins. It's difficult not to have a community as toxic as the premise of the genre itself

Thanks for including my game, i do agree, this community can be pretty toxic, i dealt with that recently, i hope i can finish beating heart and let everyone play it :)

If nothing else, whoever made the generic anime-style character models and animations on the Unity Store is making an absolute killing on all of this.

I get the vibe that a lot of these failed because the teams behind them were young, inexperienced, and biting off more than they can chew. It's pretty normal for younger people -- or, hell, people without a lot of experience in general -- to have a LOT of passion and drive to do something great, only for it to fall through when they realize how ill-equipped they are. There's also the fact that a lot of these are done out of spite, and that YanDev seems perfectly willing to take as many of these people down with him as he can.

"They accidently made a game where you bully a diverse cast of minorities and basically only minorities" is one of the funniest lines I've heard in a while, especially in relation to Tumblr. Edit: I just thought it was ironic and absurd. Y'all need to calm down.

Phrases all around the world for "impossible" America: When pigs fly Greek: When a mule foals Internet: When Yandere simulator is finished

Coming back to this video, I can't help thinking how much better YanSim would be as a visual novel. Like, time mechanics, so every action you do skips forward a certain amount of time in the day, you could play around with screen effects if you go particular places and happen across your Senpai, every place could quickly describe what's going on and you choose which situations to approach - the code would be fairly complex for a visual novel and include a lot of variables and counting up points but as someone who codes in Renpy it would totally be possible to even keep all the gameplay aspects like gossiping, befriending the unimportant students, joining clubs, hell even Info-chan. hell you could even keep having minigames for things like the maid cafe job or the clubs! And if you were coding in Renpy you wouldn't even need to use much actual Python since a lot of these mechanics could be coded just in Renpy without using init blocks, plus it's an easier coding language. Like?? Man.

I dunno, Saiko no Sutoka seems pretty well-developed to its own standard. Not as that Hitman-like open-ended game with lots of options, but as a closed-space horror survival game. I think that one of all the "yandere" titles is very promising.

Wait so two games about bullying your rivals out of existence ended up bullying each other out of existence? Now that is crazy meta. Looks like LIFE is the real Yandere Sim 😂

I remember Watashi no Mono. Dev quit the project when Covid-19 happened, and focused more on what was actually important. I know, anticlimatic, but it's a way better outcome compared to other inspired projects. Love Letter.... hoo boy. That's a whole can of worms in itself.

As a former producer in the video games industry, this is an incredibly frustrating watch. Did NONE of these people create a timeline, or a task list, or a design doc??

12:34 I used to love this game when I was younger because 1) you could customise your character 2) it was pure crack, you could fly, pick up random strangers, pick between a multitude of weird weapons/items, pretty much do anything 3) you could actually make someone fall in love and date them, it included girls which was cool (as you said in the video) I also liked the designs honestly. There was this girl in traditional japanese clothing I believe, I don't know what she was doing here but she looked pretty cool. Lastly, I took the last name of a random student and made it one of my OC's last name, I've kept it since and at this point I got too attached to it to change it. The game isn't objectively very good, but it has a special place in my heart lol Edit: one of my favorite thing I think was having your own apartment and being able to choose between a few backpacks, you had a kitten too. I had fun with the game

It's simple, really. The very concept of YS, at its core, is way more ambitious than an indie developer can handle. Sadly, we no longer live in the era of flash games where a single random dude can pump out 50 Mario/Final Fantasy clones per year. Indie game development in general is much more difficult to get into these days, and YS is *incredibly* ambitious. It's essentially trying to be Hitman and Persona in one game. Even a AAA studio might struggle with a game like this, let alone random people on the internet.

Maybe he wants to break the worlds record of the most very long game development ever. Edit: OMG THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I GET A LOT OF LIKES! thank you sm everyone! 🤧💗

Knowing what we know now, its kinda hilarious that Yandere Simulator started life in a 4Chan thread.

That Yandere Dev got exposed for being a groomer makes the controversy part a little funnier.

Basically what I'm hearing is that young, naive developers wanted to finish Yansim or prove themselves and weren't ready for the workload of making an actually competent game and all the challenges that came with that. they were trying to cash in or make a name for themselves not realizing how hard it is to make a game in the first place. Then of course the toxicity, but otherwise the main issue is getting dedicated developers and volunteers who actually care about doing long term projects.

I feel bad for nitronix in that situation because like, the timeline for him was: Get contacted to work with a very popular thing at the time Find out that you are part of more and more emerging controversy Leaves it and starts something on his own. Then essentially getting ACCIDENTALLY FRAMED about being the person who just contacted him to make a manga

Honestly the Mexico School Simulator game has my absolute respect. Especially the holiday events, which in my opinion are an absolutely underrated aspect in single player games. Outside of that, respect to all the devs still pushing on with developing.

Probably a good thing that there's a "curse" on these games. They always sound like some 12 year old's bad and/or disturbing fanfiction or RP character.

The biggest draw of a yandere simulator was the novelty. Nearly ten years later, the novelty's gone and the game hasn't moved an inch from the starting line. It doesn't matter how great your concept is, a lack of direction will be the death of it.

Hello, Starbit Light there, the team behind Suicide For Him! Unfortunately, people has been misunderstanding SFH as a fan game, however we didn't got inspired by Yandere Simulator at all. In fact, the game has even been released in Early Access on Steam, and players were very surprised and amazed by how the game turned out! We believe that the only thing that made people misleading SFH as a fan game was the very similar artstyle at some point, but we are making our best to separate our game from any other game and stand out as its own original franchise. Beside that little confusion, that was a nice video! Keep it up!

What??? An online group of people dedicated to making a game where they get to kill school children ended up being super toxic? How did that happen?

The reason why all these projects are "cursed" is obvious: Young, sometimes teenaged volunteers. Since they aren't getting paid, there's no incentive to act professional, and we all know teenagers are just toddlers with almost full grown bodies. The hormonal cocktail their brains are swirling in makes them sort of insane, and who could blame them?

when I was younger and still a fan of Yandere Simulator, I actually downloaded Schoolgirl Simulator because I didn't have a pc at the time and couldn't play the actual game. I played the game a couple times before getting bored of it and just deleting it from my phone. It was just so boring because there wasn't really objectives and it was really easy to explore the map that wasn't even really that big.

if there's one thing I noticed, these yandere sim fangames end up as the game itself. It gets developed and gets dropped almost immediately, AND drama happens. its like a continuous cycle of "history repeats itself" again and again and again

Who knew a community dedicated to a game about targeting rivals would have problems related to calling out rivals? I guess life truly imitates art.

I think the cancellation that saddens me the most is Epic Meal Dev's project because it was basically the recipe for a successful game but at the very least them ending it was their own decision and not forced by drama or YanDev himself

to be honest, schoolgirls simulator is pretty sick. its fun to mess with it EDIT: I don't even remember commenting this, but a year later, I'm still playing that game. Best fangame ever imo.

The real reason for this curse is quite simple. Yandere Simulator is an ambitious project for a small team. That's why it is still not finished and that is why all "fan games" from devs who believe they can make it faster, fail. And those that gets "finished" are very bare bones. And making ambitious projects with random non paid people over internet rarely works.

7:07 SEVERE understatement of Kiwifarm’s “trolling”

After a few months of debating this, I think i've finally figured this curse out. Yandere simulator has an amazing concept, if thought about! A young girl lives almost her entire life getting bullied by her classmates, alongside frequent doctors visits for her extreme lack of emotion, meets a boy on her first day of school and instantly falls into an obsession. She obsesses over him to no end and brutally kills anyone she deems a threat to him and her over the course of 10 weeks, even fighting off some of the most prestigious people in Japan. It's basic, but not boring basic! It's the right amount of complexity & simplicity. Now, yandere dev knows his games 'yandere' concept is good. Although, the game itself is horrible.. absolutely terrible. It runs awfully, is boring and feels like a chore, suffers from same face syndrome, is repetitive and overall buggy. Thus, when he hears another yandere game being developed, he sprints to shut it down because he knows that the yandere concept is the only thing keeping people playing his game. If his players see basically the same game just with 10x better gameplay he knows they'd drop yandere simulator immediately for that game and only occasionally return purely for nostalgia. Basically, he clings onto the yandere game aspect as it's the only thing keeping people from ditching yandere simulator. Thank you for reading this, I appreciate this a lot! Have a good day/night and don't forget to take care of yourself! 💗

i was once a volunteer of a game, it was about a girl finding their sister, similar to a ys fan game as that girl will kill the person who kidnaped the sister, i was volunteering by texture hair models and models. The reason I left the game development is because i learnt the developer was a minor, as in below 13. I did promise to rejoin the development team when their above 13 or whatever, but by the time i rejoined, after 5 or 7 days, the game development ended because of some drama, didnt bother to know but i did know it was bound to end because most fan games/mods of yan sim would randomly stop.

Honestly felt like all the clones were from people who were like “I can make a better Yandere sim game in 3 weeks!!” Lo and behold, of course they couldn’t

I’m starting to think it’s just a bad idea to develop games so publicly

I suspect the curse is: Software development is harder than most people realize, especially taking a game of this scope to completion.

Yes, Mexican School simulator is most definitely a joke game jsjsjsjs The fact it was called Conalep Simulator makes it all the funnier (the Conalep is like these public schools that have a reputation of being super wild and that basically anything can happen there)

Gotta say one thing tho. A lot, a looot of these games have a weird sense of proportions. YanSim OG included. Super giant floor tiles, small trees, mini school desks, etc. It's weird lol.

Calling yandere community toxic is like calling a ball round

After everything is said and done, it's incredible that some strangers in 4chan got together and made and insanely good visual novel in the form of katawa shoujo

One day someone will come up with the idea that makes all of these disparate elements that go into these attempts at Yandere games work together well as something playable, immersive, and challenging.

My theory is that the yandere archetype is an inherently toxic concept and tends to attract toxic people. That's why all these project collapsed into drama.

This aged super well

it seems like a lot of the reasons these game failed is because its essentially just beginner programmers who have never made a game before, thinking they can make a massive project by themselves, and do it 'better than yanderedev', and end up failing after two weeks due to lack of motivation, or getting involved in awful drama

Why call it a "curse"? Endless drama is the expected outcome when a group that fetishizes teenage murder have to work together.

Man really sacrificed 1000+ hours reviewing every game listed here not including the amount of research done here just for our sake.

That moment when you realise that _Bully_ by Rockstar is the only good "yandere game"

i'm back from 2 years later, yandere simulator is CANCELLED due to yandere-dev being the disgusting person he is and gr00m1n9 a 16 year old (ayano's voice actor) which led to all the other voice actors also leaving and with that, yandere simulator getting officially cancelled. almost all of the people in the yan-sim community have also left the community for the actions of yandere-dev and almost everyone in the fandom/community has left. however, i feel like one of the reasons why most of the yan-sim fandom leaving isn't due to yandere-devs actions but for the game being cancelled. that is because yandere-dev wasn't such a saint before either, he had done MULTIPLE bad things and only a small range had left the fandom. we never got to see the game getting complete and getting all 12 rivals on the spot. although it has been a fun ride, the only one we can blame at the moment is yandere-dev for taking the main part in his actions, so, with that said, goodbye yan-sim. goodbye forever.

God, I was never big into YanSim, but I was right in the middle of the Love Letter community. It was actually crazy and pretty infectious, people were excited at the idea of a game like YanSim completely divorced from YanDev’s horrible creepiness. And then it disintegrated almost overnight. It was wild how quickly the community fell apart.

What’s interesting is that the whole concept of a “Yandere” is that the person is very toxic overall to her love interest, and ironically it seems the community is just as toxic, which seems to be the main reason most of these games failed. 🙃 that’s quite unfortunate.

I'm over a year late to this, but oh my god, that secondary Project Lovestruck you talked about with the neat concept art, was actually something I made all the way back in middle school (definitely way too young to be invested in a game like yansim) and just to clarify, it had been something unrelated to the Project Lovestruck, merely a concept for an AU of sorts rather than a full game project. I never thought I'd ever hear about it again after so many years! That's so wild! Also awesome video, I never knew just the wide scope of how many fangames there have been out there and it's so awesome learning the history of them even with how messy so many of them ended. Totally wish I had found this way sooner than I had

At this rate, someone should just reskin an old hitman game and call it "Hitman 47 yandere edition"

Hey, Nitronix here. When the LL drama happened i was 15 and had been going through a lot of mental shit around that time and seeing loads of ppl online basically tell me i was someone else was excruciating. I felt like I was going insane. And the irony is that because I tried to prove i was who i said i was i ended up with a cop pointing a gun at me after busting into my house. I guess the lesson is not to do stupid cringey shit but God the internet is crazy

Saiko no Sutoka is actually my favourite on this list because of the cut scenes, modes and basically anything else

welp add the main game here too lmao

Once again, I'd like to recommend any aspiring game developers to share their source code early and often. We' would have got a finished game long ago if every single project didn't have to start from scratch, reinventing the same damn wheel time and time again. These days the best way to finish a fan project like this is one piece at a time, not even aiming to complete the game all at once but to share your efforts for others to build upon, making sure the project doesn't get shut down or fall into inactivity on a single person's shoulders. This goes doubly for fan games of any corporation's intellectual properties. Spread the work over the internet, so that no one can shut it down by holding a single person accountable.

fun fact. the “yandere sim model” was a free asset- named aoi. yandev(alex) just downloaded it.

This 'curse' is just what happens to most games, by devs that don't have experience in releasing games: - They rely on volunteers because they don't know how to finish it on their own, become overly dependent on them and public relations, making the project jeopardized if just one volunteer stops working. This also creates a tension that fuels drama. - They take help from just about anyone in order to finish their game, thinking that more hands are better. While it just creates more dependency, more need for management and more opportunity for drama. - They underestimate the scope of the project, get swept up by their vision and are unwilling to compromise at things that deter from it.

the dove/hawk system in the tumblr game actually sounds like a great idea hahahaha

this aged like fine wine

The thing with Mexican school simulator is that it's a parody of an actual mexican school named Conalep, that school exists almost everywhere and it's such a known meme and when all simulators began to pop up everywhere, people suggested to make one about Conalep and all the bizarre themes that surround the school's name

I honestly wouldn't mind seeing what a company can do with the concept. I doubt they'd have drama because they'd treat it like a job. Maybe drama starts because of lack of leadership.

If your pitch begins with "It'll be better than YanSim," your development is already a trainwreck

Put a sombrero and a fake mustache on anything and it becomes pure gold.

Great video! I'm pretty deep into the Yandere Simulator community, so seeing some games even I was unaware of was a pleasant surprise. I agree that there does seem to be a "curse", but it's largely because most of these projects follow this formula: -The devs are too young, immature, and inexperienced -The game is made public basically as soon as the devs are able to import the Aoi model pack into the project -The game yoinks the already broken Yandere Simulator formula and doesn't know where to go once they've caught up to the original game -The devs underestimate how much work goes into the project -The devs have public fights/petty drama (like you said). Bonus in that since the community is such a small pool of people, this is almost inevitable for the majority of these games since you can't quite get away from the people you have beef with -The "team" is very small and fickle -The dev themselves have almost no skills to contribute to the project OR are artists first, programmers second, developers third. Wants to improve on Yandere Simulator because they see its flaws but don't actually know what to add or how that's an actual improvement. I've lurked in and participated in many Discord servers dedicated to many of these projects, so I've been able to see them crash and burn in real time, complete with petty fights and immaturity from everyone. Here are some small details/fun facts you may have been unaware of since you didn't mention them in the video: -Project RY was born after the development team of NYS (Not Yandere Simulator) fell apart. There's almost no evidence of them existing after they deleted their Discord server around 2018 (was there for that. It was magical), so I don't blame you for missing them. -The RU-vid channel of Sara's School Life's actually made one of the (many) mistakes that Yanderedev made which was to lash out in frustration because of repetitive of comments and questions (in this case it was "is this coming to Android?"). They uploaded a very short video that was very similar to Yanderedev's "Stop Sending Me Emails" video. -The '"toxicity" in question on the Discord server was mostly people asking for updates/criticizing the lack of progress (admittedly in a not so civil manner) since the team had largely been silent for a while. The only person who consistently seemed to be working on the project was one of the head writers. -There's currently a(nother) Watashi no Mono Revival project that was semi-active on Discord earlier this year. As of about a month ago (I think), they locked the server, allegedly due to a very angry someone harassing someone else, at some point. There have been no official updates, development or otherwise, since August. The Discord server invites are restricted, so I can't send a link, unfortunately. -There's yet another game called SkyJane which was announced somewhat recently on r/Osana that seems to be a mashup of Harry Potter and My Hero Academia. It seems to be rather large in scope, but is currently active here: ru-vid.com/show-UCapJr9eIEszxTsl6bEpqCfg -Suicide for Him isn't on hiatus. Like you said, the Discord server is active, and it actually seems that things might be going semi-smoothly? As of today, Steam is reviewing their game and they're looking to upload it as Early Access soon. Related to this, I pointed out a while ago that the name "Suicide for Him" might not be great for optics, so an unofficial alternative name is Sudoku for Him. As for the video itself, I'll say this: I like that you reached out to everyone involved, but was disappointed by your lack of elaboration on those discussions. It might take up more time, but I would prefer you just give a more detailed recap of those conversations instead of "I talked to X and Y about this (people who definitely had very different perspectives), and both had lots to say, but in the end they both agreed that Z." I honestly don't know how you dug up so much information about even the very, *very* shortlived games, so kudos for that too.

ex-dev of Limerence here (as you can tell from the profile picture lol). Just wanted to say that Limerence itself was a mess. Originally started in a discord server as a fangame being made in revenge against YanDev. I remember the YanSim rivals got leaked in this chat by one of the volunteers and it wasn’t a great start to development… there was also a lot of in-house bullying which was separate from the drama with Love Me. I was the 2D pixel artist for the game and also one of the writers. One of the devs in particular (Ophelia) was a big cause of the downfall of the game, they were pretty controlling, started a lot of drama and the reason I left the team back in 2017 due to some questioning views on transgender women which was akin to the same sort of views that TERFs hold. Sort of checks out since one of the rivals was a transgender woman and her elimination method was pretty… brutal. The point about the game being a bullying simulator against people from different minorities is a very good point and I felt that when I was working on the game. In all honesty, I wanted the game to be more focused on the murder mystery rather than the social sabotage aspect but then I guess it wouldn’t have been a YanSim fangame, it would have been an entirely different genre. Was not surprised in the slightest when it flopped over a year after I left the team.

Hoo boy, does this video need an update.

Only reason why these games are cursed, is because people try too hard to actually try what this game was conceptualized as 💀 But if you really wanna make something inspired by this, you have to start small. Like maybe instead of a Hitman/Persona/school based mixed game, make it 1/10th of those aspects. Make it a smaller ranged game with lesser students in the game, may be 20 so its like a private school situation with a small building. After the world is done, forget about Yandere Simulator entirely, and think about what game mechanics would go with the game. There was one YanSim inspired game that did try and flesh out gameplay aspects to allow you to sneak around much better compared to the actual Yansim, but the creator wasn't able to work on the game anymore, since they found something better to do, or got busy. More so I think its just that people try to "Do better than that lazy ass Yandere Dev" and thats why they fail, because such a big game with a small group of people wouldn't go well.

The story behind Virtuamax is depressing honestly, just because the community thought NitroNix was Drapeis, going as far as to doxxing the poor guy? I hope NitroNix is okay and moves away from the toxic yandere community

Saiko no Sutoka is actually a really good game!I hope the dev is able to finish it

'cause we don't need rivals in a rival based video game, we need helicopters!' replace helicopters with pretty much any of the recent yansim features and it fits for that game too lmao

"a project based on spite is never gonna go anywhere anyway" yandere sim: ...

One game that really stood out to me was the Mexican school simulator because I hardly ever seen an Anime simulator game taken place in Mexico. Besides that, It looked like it would’ve been really popular

Moral of the story: If you're going to release a Yandere Sim game, act like a business & don't talk to the public at all, & make sure both you & your employees have professional attitudes instead of emotional baggage.

What a wonderful time to watch this video for the first time, amiright?

Mexican School Simulator truly is the Switzerland of YanSim fan games....and I never thought I'd say that sentence. Edit: Why did so many of you like this dumb comment? 😂

Holy hell, did I really just listen to almost an hour straight of failed Yandere games? Yes, yes I did. Well done sir

The Yandere-chan hairstyle and model weren't the original ones that Yandere dev made, The Models were bought at the Asset store, and the other Developers downloaded it too which makes it that the other games copied Yandere chan's hairstyle and model is wrong.

Dude make a part 2 now there’s even more of the insanity