Fallout co-creator and The Outer Worlds co-developer Tim Cain has given his views on the growth of influencer culture and its power to not only form opinions on video games, but potentially dictate them.
In a video on his personal YouTube channel, Cain was asked by a subscriber to give his views on how the advent of social media and game streaming changed game design.
Cain responded by suggesting that some developers started designing their games with streaming and social media clips in mind, believing that spectacular set pieces were more likely to be shared online and drive interest in the game.
“Many designers like myself, we frequently thought: ‘Well, how is a certain event in the game going to look like when someone’s playing it live or live or recording themselves playing it to put up as a stream?’” Cain explained. “We thought about cinematics. We thought about end bosses. We thought about unusual weapons you could get. And because of that, we wanted it to look really good in video.
“And that was one reason particle effects became a big thing because you didn’t just want to go ‘boom’. You wanted a big explosion and you wanted it to be pretty and colourful and all these things, especially in a clip because people will see that on some channel where someone’s talking about the game, and they see that clip, and now they really want to play the game.
“So now we’re thinking about our game the way we used to think about interviews. When you went into an interview, you were like ‘okay, I got to have some sound bites ready, so when I get quoted, I want to make sure the sound bites are quoted’. Now it’s like ‘what part of our game would make good clips for influencers to show?’.”
Cain then suggested that while influencers may be good for like-minded players who want advice on which games to buy, he’s concerned that some viewers are no longer forming their own opinions based on the influencers’ advice, but simply adopting the influencers’ opinions as their own.
“Now we’re in the 2020s and many gamers don’t even look to influencers for reviews,” he said. “They look to influencers to be told how to think about the games. So, people don’t form opinions from the online video. They’re handed an opinion from the online channel they’re watching.
“What this means is I’ve seen reviews go from ‘this game has less combat and more puzzles and dialogues for you to interact with than this other game’ to ‘this game is stupid and slow paced and made for casuals, I think you should skip it’.
“That’s a huge difference in how games are presented. But more people are going for that ladder. They’re like: ‘I don’t have time. There’s too many games. Just tell me whether I should buy it. Tell me if it’s for me.’ So they find someone they just like, and then that person’s opinion becomes their opinion.”
Cain explained that while he sees the benefits of players following the advice of influencers whose opinions they trust, he’s been seeing examples of players simply going with what they’ve been told and repeating influencers’ opinions rather than thinking for themselves.
“This has a positive side,” he said. “It’s easy to find someone who sides with your preferences and therefore is a good guide for you finding new games. And I’ve talked about that. That’s how I look for game reviewers myself. I look at their reviews for games I already know. If they like the ones I liked and didn’t like the ones I didn’t like, then I will trust them going forward on reviews of games that I haven’t played yet.
“But the negative to this is more and more people seem to be abdicating their own judgment to that of people they see online. It’s like ‘I don’t want to think about it, you tell me what I should think about it’.
“More and more people seem to be abdicating their own judgment to that of people they see online.”
“And I see that sometimes on this channel when I get multiple nearly identical comments from people and I realize they’re just quoting an online influencer. Sometimes it’s a meme, but more often it’s ‘oh, this influencer person said this thing about this and now they’re just quoting without any attribution in a comment’ – sometimes even when it doesn’t apply, which just makes me go ‘are they understanding why the person said that?’
Cain concluded that he was concerned about the future of video game discourse if it continues this way, and he doesn’t know what the future holds.
“I’m curious now because it’s 2026 and I have no idea what the 2030s are going to be like,” he explained. “I’m concerned it will go one of two ways because the pendulum always swings.
“Either things are going to become even more tightly controlled in bubbles, which means people will stick to this one influencer, or this tiny group of influencers, and all of their thoughts will be guided by these people.
“Or maybe the next generation is going to get tired of that. Get tired of all the labeling and the tired of all the placing things in a box, ‘I defined a box, and this game is in this box, and I’m not going to view it any other way’.
“I’m curious where that goes. The internet basically allows the pendulum like that to swing really far and really fast. So, I don’t know where the 2030s are going to go., but that’s what’s happened with game design and online influencers and social media over about the last 4-5 years.”
Cain announced in December that he had re-joined Xbox’s Obsidian Entertainment as a full-time employee, and revealed that he’s currently working on an unannounced project, which he says he doesn’t think fans will be able to guess.
