According to Tim Cain, it’s not that hard to figure out why there’s so much violence in AAA role-playing games, and he doesn’t see much chance of that changing.

On January 1, Cain posted a video (embedded below) in which he answered a fan’s question about when he thinks AAA RPGs will change to be less violent. He said that action RPGs (like Diablo) sell better than CRPGs (where there’s more dialogue or combat that can be stopped) because combat is an easy way to put together a game’s marketing campaign. He also had a problem with this when Obsidian ran into it as director of The Outer Worlds.

“Companies make games – and products in general – that people want to buy. That’s it. That means that the games that sell the most will dictate future games. If you’re a company and you’re trying to make money, and there’s one type of game that sells millions of copies and another that sells 100,000, if they both take the same amount of time and money to make, which one are you going to make? When you see a trailer and you see people actually doing things – jumping, climbing, shooting, punching – it looks like, ‘Wow! Look at all the things you can do in this game.’

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 might only be 15-30 seconds long? You have to take this wonderful story that is super creative and nuanced and has a huge arc and boil it down to a sound bite. If you look at the top 50 or top 100 on Steam, you see a lot of action games, violent games. Companies don’t make them because they feel like it. They make them because they sell. There are products and stores and whole companies that I will not buy from. I don’t think they care or even notice, but I do. It’s just one of those things where you have to draw the line somewhere and everybody draws it in a different place. Not drawing a line because you think it doesn’t matter is a way of guaranteeing that it doesn’t matter. It’s like when people say, “I’m not going to vote because my one vote won’t matter. Once enough people think that way, it does matter,” Cain said.

It’s hard to argue with that.

Source: PCGamer