Fallout Co-Creator Tim Cain Says Gamers No Longer Form Opinions, They’re “Handed” Them by Influencers They Like

Veteran game developer and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has only just recently returned to game development full-time, but he's also kept up his personal YouTube channel, as he promised he would when he re-joined Obsidian Entertainment in December 2025. That's where his latest comments on the state of the industry that are catching several eyes come from, as he shares how the rise of social media influencers and "how the internet changed game design."

Cain discusses how he's seen the video games industry, and specifically how the industry portrays video games to its audience. Anyone who follows games knows how much thought studios try to put into their marketing campaigns, and if you've been following games throughout your childhood into adult life, you've seen how that's changed in the modern era of streamers and social media influencers.

That's very different from what Cain describes, with how games were sold and marketed back in the 1980s. The internet changed everything in the 1990s, and then everything changed again 2000s, and once again in the 2010s.

"More than showing how to play games, they were actually recommending whether you should buy them or not," Cain says about early 2010s YouTubers. "Differently than journalists. Journalists were saying, 'Look at the game, look at all these features, it supports this, it's very similar to this game, etc.' And then they'd give it like, 'We're going to give it an eight out of ten, because it was a little buggy, but we liked it.'"

"Influencers did something different. They were like, 'Here's a game. I love it. It's for you,' and then they'd show high points of it...Publishers responded to this by sending copies of the game to influencers and online channels just as much as they did to game journalists."

Cain goes on to discuss how this made game designers consider which parts of their games would look good on stream, whether it was specific cinematics, weapons, mechanics, and bosses. "You didn't just want it to go boom. You wanted a big explosion and 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."

Cain compares the shift to how game developers used to prepare for interviews with journalists. Going into interviews, they'd have quotes in mind that they'd want to make sure they'd say, in the hopes that it would be called out and quoted by the reporters interviewing them. That's changed now to gam developers thinking, "Now, it's like, 'What part of our game would make good clips for influencers to show?'" on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.

"And now we're in the 2020s, and many gamers don't even look to influencers for reviews; 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 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...they find someone they just like, and so that person's opinion becomes their opinion."

Now, as Cain points out, this isn't an entirely negative path. People have always followed the top 'critics' of their day because they aligned with that person's tastes. That's how reviews have always worked, we've just shifted from those critics coming from large outlets to a sea of individuals, making it easy for everyone to find someone who aligns with them. That's the positive side of this shift to a focus on influencers.

"But the negative to this," Cain continues, "is more and more people seem to be abdicating their own judgement 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. 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."

Cain's concerns for this shift are both the fact that, at least for what he's seen in his storied career in game development, players are using their own judgment less and that designers are starting to think about whether specific influencers would like the game they are making and are instead making it for a specific audience rather than just making the game they want to make. He emphasizes that he doesn't take that approach, but it's something he's heard discussed by other developers.

"I’m curious now because it’s 2026 and I have no idea what the 2030s are going to be like. I’m concerned it will go one of two ways because the pendulum always swings," Cain continues. "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."

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.