Generally most of the best selling games these days have some amount of violence in them, and if you ask Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, that’s because we keep buying them.
Look, I’m not going to have a big, annoying conversation with you about violence in video games on a Sunday. It’s a bit old hat, and there’s plenty of room for nuance, I just don’t feel like making a judgement call on it right now – another time, maybe. All the same, when someone like the co-creator of Fallout Tim Cain shares his thoughts on video game violence and why games with violence keep getting made, it’s probably at least worth a bit of a listen. Cain shared a video right at the start of the year titled “Violence As The Default In AAA RPGs”, where he spoke about the simple reason as to “why so many AAA RPGs expect and often require the player to do combat”. It’s money!
“The TL;DR of it is, companies make games – and, in general, products – that people will buy. That’s it,” Cain explained (thanks, PC Gamer). “It means games that sell the most – and I’m not even talking about review the best, just sell the most – will dictate future games. This is obvious. If you have a company and it’s trying to make money and there’s one game type that sells millions of copies and another one that sells a hundred thousand, which one are you going to do if they both take just as much time and money to develop? This is why I tell people to vote with their dollars.”
Cain also pushed back on the argument that those that abstain from buying such games wouldn’t be just a “drop in the bucket,” because if enough people came together “those drops become a storm and companies will listen”. A big part of this obviously comes down to marketing too, as games with lots of advertising will be more likely to sell better, but Cain also notes that something like an action RPG is easier to sell conceptually than a classic RPG, even if they both have violence, because action RPGs are more dynamic to look at.
“It’s hard to show the other things,” Cain notes, continuing, “How do we show that this game has a really good story? How do we show that it has fantastic dialogue? How do you do that in a trailer that may only be 15 or 30 seconds long?” There’s probably not really a solution to any of this, games that sell well will likely continue to, but it’s always interesting when notable industry veterans try to find some answers all the same.