Fallout series co-creator Tim Cain has a very active YouTube channel, in which he shares insight from the perspective of a veteran game developer. Recently, he’s been touching on the topic of how devs take feedback from fans, and in his latest video, he gives players advice on how to tell devs what they want.
Put simply, he feels that gamers spend too much time focusing on what they hate, rather than what they like. He urges players to give better, more specific feedback to developers, telling them exactly what they want, rather than just complaining about features that they don’t want.
Tim Cain Explains Why Devs Don’t Know What Gamers Want
Making a game that appeals to everyone just isn’t possible
Cain opens the video by asking a question: Do developers know what gamers want? “No, no we don’t know what you want. We have no idea,” he says. “Here’s the longer answer and it can be summed up as, ‘Because you don’t know either.”
He goes on to elaborate on what he means by this. “First off, many of you only tell developers what you hate,” he explains. “When you keep saying I hate this in games, I hate this feature, I hate these kinds of characters and all that, great. What kind of characters do you want? If you hate sarcastic characters, well guess what? There’s an entire realm of non-sarcastic characters. But what is it you want? Do you want funny characters? Do you want serious characters?”
However, he says that players should also be more specific when explaining what they want. “Even when you say what you want, you’re often extraordinarily vague. You will say, ‘I want a better game, I want better AI, I want a better UI.’ Yeah I’ll just slide the better slider from okay to great on all of those.”
Of course, yet another issue is that everyone has a different idea of what a good game is, which he also touched upon in the video. “There’s no possible way to make a game that will make all of you happy”, he explains. “I get that you, the individual, want what you, the individual, want. But you have to realize that you, the individual, are not very good at giving developers feedback, and that you, the individual, are not everybody the game’s being made for.”
He summarises his points by saying that individuals need to realise they are not the majority, and if they do want to leave feedback, it should be as specific as possible. He sympathisers with those who have unpopular game preferences though, admitting that he made his earlier games for himself, and just hoped that others liked them.
As for Cain’s next game project, we know that he’s been working on The Outer Worlds 2. He seemingly isn’t taking a lead role, as he left Obsidian in 2020, but he is at least being consulted on it.
