Violent video games don’t create neck spasms and murderers the way so many people seem to assume, but they are undeniably prevalent in the gaming industry. According to Fallout creator Tim Cain, there’s an obvious reason for that.
“If you look at, like, the Steam top 50 or top 100 [most played games],” Cain says in a new YouTube video dissecting the topic of violent RPGs, “you see an awful lot of action, violent-oriented games. The companies don’t make them because they feel like it. They make them because they sell.”
At the moment, Steam’s 11th most played game – lodged between Call of Duty (guns) and War Thunder (tanks) – is the free-to-play clicker game Banana, in which players click on a banana. But Cain emphasizes that pacifist games, whether they involve peelable fruit, flourishing gardens, or making Sims WooHoo in a coffin, are the exception, not the rule.
“This is why I always tell people, ‘vote with your dollars,'” Cain says. “If you think you’re just a drop in the bucket – if enough people do this, those drops become a storm, and companies will listen.”
“It’s just one of those things that, you have to draw the line somewhere, and everybody draws it in a different spot, and I get it,” Cain continues. “You have a different financial situation, or you have a different situation about where you actually live and what is available to you. I get it. But to not draw a line because you think it won’t matter is a way to guarantee it won’t matter.”
Violent video games might be thriving, but at least cozy farming sim Stardew Valley has sold over 41 million copies as of right now, with over half on PC and almost 8 million on the Switch.