Fallout co-creator Tim Cain is never going to make sequels for his string of early 2000s RPGs — including Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil — because they were too beloved by a niche and passionate group of gamers. In other words, they didn’t make any money.
“People regularly tell me, ‘Why don’t you make another game like Bloodlines,’ or, ‘Why don’t you make a sequel to Arcanum?'” Cain told PC Gamer in a new interview. “They’re like, ‘You made a cult classic.’ And I’m like, ‘The problem is the cult part.'”
“I hate to put things so mechanically,” he continued, “but sometimes gamers need to put their money where their mouth is. If they don’t like a game, they shouldn’t buy it. If they love a game, they should buy it, and then they’re going to get more of what they want.”
Despite the Fallout franchise’s mammoth success, Cain’s been victim to poor sales more often than not in his career. Most brutally, he had to shutter Troika Games, his RPG developer, in 2005 after it failed to secure publisher funding. At the time, co-founder Leonard Boyarsky told the now-defunct website GameSpy that “people are looking for titles that will appeal to a more mainstream audience than ours have traditionally.”
“In plain English,” he continued, “our games just didn’t sell enough units.” Though 20 years have passed since Boyarsky made these comments, Cain clearly still shares the sentiment.
“If a game comes out and sells a million copies,” Cain told PC Gamer, “it’ll probably get a sequel. If a game comes out and sells 50,000 copies, it’s not getting a sequel.”
But there’s energizing value in a cult classic, too. In a recent YouTube video, Cain implored viewers not to forget Troika’s 2003 turn-based D&D game The Temple of Elemental Evil, to which one commenter promised that “it hasn’t been forgotten.”
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