Fallout co-creator urges the industry to learn from bad games — publishers ignore failures by chasing hits

Tim Cain, co-creator of the Fallout series and a prolific video blogger, published a video on Wednesday arguing that the video game industry should pay more attention to bad games. According to him, publishers often fail to learn from failure because they only look at titles that sold well.

Cain noted that gamers frequently point to popular games and say, "we want more of that," without necessarily understanding what specific elements made those games so good. When they do mention bad games, they tend to focus only on well-known flops, ignoring the many mediocre titles that were simply forgotten.

The developer compared this tunnel vision to survivorship bias — analyzing only successful examples while disregarding the vast number of failures. He emphasized that many "bad" games, such as Viking: Battle for Asgard, deserve closer examination because they can offer valuable lessons that are invisible when studying only hits.

Cain clarified that he was not referring to irredeemable failures like Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, but rather the many cases where "one game came out, it wasn't very good, and it was forgotten." In his view, these overlooked projects can teach the industry more about what went wrong than analyzing successful blockbusters ever could.

He drew a parallel to the writer Alan Moore, who once said that reading drivel can be even more fruitful for aspiring authors than reading classics. Cain suggested the same principle applies to game development: negative inspiration from studying poor games can be more instructive than only admiring masterpieces.