Bad games may have more to teach the industry than major hits

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Fallout co-creator argues for the value of bad games, saying developers need to pay closer attention to them.

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When a game becomes a phenomenon, it does not take long for a line of companies to emerge, all trying to figure out what worked so well. It happened with open worlds, then again with battle royales and, in recent years, it has become even more apparent in the race for live-service games. The problem is that looking at a hit and copying its most obvious features does not necessarily mean understanding why millions of people chose to play it.

That was precisely the point recently raised by Timothy Cain, co-creator of Fallout. In his view, developers should pay closer attention to games that failed, because there is a natural tendency to study major successes and simply forget the failures. As Cain puts it, “the qualities of successful games may not be the qualities that made them successful.”

It may seem like a minor distinction, but it helps explain some of the industry’s strangest moves over the past few decades. A game becomes a hit, one easily identifiable feature becomes a trend and, a few years later, a wave of projects attempts to replicate it. The problem is that games take a long time to make, while trends can fade much faster.

Copying a hit is much easier than understanding it

Fortnite is perhaps the most obvious example. When its Battle Royale exploded in popularity, it was easy to conclude that there was enormous demand for more games built around that format. New battle royales, battle passes, seasons and, later, an even bigger rush toward live-service games followed. Some companies found their place, but many others discovered that simply replicating the structure was not enough.

The same issue emerged with Concord. Firewalk Studios’ game arrived in 2024 in a market that, judging only by its biggest hits, seemed extremely appealing. Hero shooters, competitive multiplayer, constant updates and characters designed to sustain a franchise were all elements found in several profitable products. Even so, Sony pulled Concord from stores just two weeks after launch and later shut down the studio.

Source: Sony
Source: Sony

That does not mean live-service games do not work. Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant and many others prove exactly the opposite. The key is understanding that their results depend on far more than a business model or a checklist of features that can be replicated in a planning meeting.

Release timing, visual identity, price, competition, community, marketing and even hard-to-predict circumstances can separate a phenomenon from a failure. When a game sells tens of millions of copies, it is very tempting to look back and find a simple explanation. There rarely is one.

Cain has also discussed another related problem: chasing what seems popular today is particularly risky because major games can take five, six or more years to develop. By the time a studio finally delivers its answer to a trend, audiences may already be interested in something else.

Bad games raise questions that good ones do not always ask

That is where failures start to become interesting. A game that did not work allows for the investigation of far more concrete problems. Did players leave early? Did progression become repetitive? Did the price put audiences off? Were better competitors offering virtually the same experience? Did the marketing fail to explain the product? Or perhaps nobody was asking for that game in the first place?

Naturally, there is also a risk of oversimplifying failure. Just as a success is unlikely to have a single explanation, a commercial disaster rarely happens because of one decision alone. But studying these cases at least forces developers and publishers to look for answers rather than merely identify what appears to work and attempt to reproduce it.

Timothy Cain himself has said he learned this during his career. After working on Fallout and Arcanum, he encountered difficulties with The Temple of Elemental Evil, released by Troika Games in 2003. Cain later explained that criticism of the game’s character development made him recognize one of his own limitations: writing lore, descriptions and certain types of text did not automatically mean he was equally good at creating dialogue and characters. It was a troubled project that revealed something his earlier successes had not.

Source: Reproduction
Source: Reproduction

There is also a less comfortable issue for companies. Successes are celebrated, studied in internal presentations and quickly turned into case studies. Failures are usually left behind. Cain sums it up by invoking the old idea that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. When something works, many people can point to their contribution to the result. When it goes wrong, it is much more convenient to frame the project as an exception and move on.

Perhaps that is the part of Cain’s argument that deserves the most attention today. The industry is going through years of expensive projects, cancellations, studio closures and thousands of layoffs. In this environment, continuing to treat failures as products that need only be forgotten means wasting some of the most useful information they can offer.

The proposal is not to start looking for bad games in order to discover an inverse formula for success. That would merely repeat the same mistake by another route. The point is simpler: video games are far too complex for their results to be explained by a single trend, mechanic or business model. If the industry truly wants to understand why some projects find an audience and others do not, it may need to spend less time copying what sits at the top of the charts and a little more trying to understand everything left along the way.

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