Veteran game developers from RPG companies like Obsidian and Bioware have stated in a series of tweets just before the holidays that the temporary death of CRPGs in the early 2000s was due to retailer interference.

As GamesRadar discovered, conversations between Nathaniel Chapman and Josh Sawyer began discussing the role retail giants once played in the life and death of the game genre Chapman, a designer for Timberline, and Sawyer, a designer for Blizzard and Obsidian, were both at the time of the game's death, Blizzard and Obsidian, while Sawyer was Obsidian's studio design director, working on games such as "Pillars of Eternity" and "Icewind Dale."

"I had completely forgotten that buyers like Best Buy and Walmart seeing your games was such a big deal for shelf space and sales," Chapman wrote, to which Sawyer responded that Walmart had been in the past about content While it has been "cautious," he noted, it has hypocritically kept shelves open for GTAs.

Chapman added, "I think the worst part is that there is a self-fulfilling atmosphere that certain genres, mechanics, etc. don't sell, and retailers don't stock games with them." Finally, one commenter asked Sawyer for specifics, which he explained in a follow-up thread.

According to Sawyer, it was a snakebitten situation: "How often do you hear a retailer rep declare a certain genre/style/look dead without any supporting data at all? It was a truly vibes-based prediction that resulted in a self-fulfilling prophecy."

The idea that "isometric RPGs are not popular" is bullshit, given how enormously successful "Baldur's Gate 3" has been for Larian Studios, although one could argue that the 2D/pre-rendered background aesthetic may be outdated, I hesitate to argue that.

Pillars of Eternity did well, and its sequel did not sell as well as Sawyer had hoped, but was still critically well received. Whether that was true in an era when big-box stores were dominant, however, is another story entirely.

Still, retailers were not the only ones to fall short when it came to CRPGs; BG3 had already developed the critically acclaimed Divinity Original Sin: 2, which was a huge Early Access success and used the highly popular TTRPG license Gaider is the co-founder and creative director of Summerfall Games, a former scenario designer at BioWare, and the lead writer on the Dragon Age series. He has worked extensively as a lead writer for the Dragon Age series.

"It wasn't just retailers," Gaidar wrote. There is an "industry wisdom" that creeps into development teams, where some things are simply declared dead or too old-fashioned, and you can't disagree with this certainty until someone else comes along and proves it's not 100% true.

Gaider reminds me of the infamous talk given by Emil Pagliarulo (lead writer and designer of Starfield) at the Story conference about his work on Fallout 4 and Skyrim. In it, he made the assumption that gamers "tear pages" out of a game's story and "make paper airplanes" with it, arguing that developers should "keep it simple, stupid," i.e., limit the game's narrative to one or two central themes.

While that may be true in some cases (who hasn't skipped a cut scene?), "Baldur's Gate 3" deals with everything from themes of abuse and survival to Terry Pratchett-style silly wholesomeness, in a messy, sprawling, multi-layered stories.

It is important to emphasize that Pagliarulo said this seven years ago, and that his opinion may have changed, but the relative lack of sustained interest in the world and story of "Starfield" is a good example of what Gaidar is saying: major studio The conventional wisdom of traditional developers with story leads has very recently been proven wrong. Nevertheless, "Starfield" sold like hotcakes.

With the advent of online stores, big-box retailers are no longer the genre-defining force they once were, but I can understand the lingering frustration on the part of developers and players alike; Pagliarulo's assessment was damning because people used to yearning for a complex fallout, and I can't count the number of times PC games have been declared "dead" already. Whether it's wave-based predictions or wave-based developer wisdom, games that play it safe 100% of the time are seldom remembered.