Tim Cain says this because publishers often fail to learn from their mistakes. They only focus on successful titles.
Alan Moore once said that the negative inspiration we draw from trashy works is more fruitful for aspiring writers than the inspiration we get from the classics. Cain, the co-creator of Fallout who has recently become quite prolific in producing vlogs, took it a step further in a video he posted on Wednesday. In it, he declared that everyone—from major publishers to casual gamers—can learn a thing or two from bad games. He’s not talking about irredeemable trash like Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, but rather the many instances when a game was released that wasn’t very good and quickly faded into obscurity. It’s precisely from these kinds of games that we can learn the most. One such example is Viking: Battle for Asgard.
“For a publisher, success is defined by game sales. Because of that, they often don’t learn from failure because they only look at games that sold well. Gamers will often point to popular games and say, ‘We want more of that,’ without knowing what made those games so good. If they do point to bad games, they tend to point to well-known bad games. In addition to looking for common features among successful games, you should also look for common features among unsuccessful ones,” Cain said.
Cain compared the industry’s narrow perspective, which focuses exclusively on critics’ favorites, bestsellers, and high-profile flops, to survival bias. Cain argues that if we can’t distinguish the good from the bad in a game, we easily overlook why it is successful. This happens all the time in the gaming world, and everyone does it. Although all of this is subjective, Cain essentially argues that not every element of a good game contributes equally to its quality. Plenty of great games have low frame rates, terrible user interfaces, and bugs that cause crashes. A reliable way to gain a deeper understanding of games, he says, is to sit down with a failed game and curiously examine what went wrong.
Source:PCGamer
