Fallout was created by Tim Cain at Interplay. Herve Caen staged a hostile takeover of the company, forced out Cain and Brian Fargo, and proceeded to run the company into the ground and loot its corpse. Tim Cain was in the process of buying back IP from Interplay when Todd Howard swooped in and bought it for more than Cain could afford. Basically, Tim Cain had his baby - his magnum opus - stolen from him TWICE.

If not for Bethesda, we would have had multiple BG3 level sequels by now, instead of the looter-shooter garbage that Bethesda turned it into.

I can't see a way to frankly assess the quality of a game on its commercial success, but let's at least not pretend the franchise's popularity is based on its later installments - that puts the cart before the horse imo.

Interplay going bankrupt is the reason Bethesda owns this IP. FO3 wasn't a bad game, but it started development before their involvement. Everything Bethesda made on its own has been increasingly in their own simulationist, environmental style, which can be fun but isn't a good fit for the highly novelistic style that made it popular to begin with.

You have to take a look on the size of the "gaming market" at release dates of those games. At mid 90s gaming was barely a thing, since PCs were still unbelievably expensive. Ten years later it was very different. Plus consoles on top of it...

To try to answer, succinctly (which I'm bad at): looking backward is easier than looking forward. What I mean by that is since you didn't get into the series until 3, it makes sense that you wouldn't have a problem with 3 and 4, since it's harder to see what the series could have been...as pretentious as that sounds.

Where much of the hate comes from (and I think a lot of it is overblown - I'm not trying to justify the behavior of the maniacs out there) is that the overarching progression of the series feels reset. Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 showed a progression in a *post-*post-apocalyptic world, with society advancing again, to some degree. Shady Sands grew between 1 and 2, and was the foundation of the NCR.

So Fallout 3 at the time was IMHO a disappointment because the setting felt more generic, and like they were just playing the greatest hits from 1 and 2. I get the arguments that the setting in-universe was hit harder, but it still felt weird that it was post-apocalpytic instead of post-post-apocalyptic.

One reason (as always, IMHO) that New Vegas was so popular is that it continued to build on 1 and 2. We saw the NCR had continued to grow, other factions rise in importance, and generally felt less like the bombs had dropped the year prior. It's what a lot of folks hoped Fallout 3 would be, in that sense. That's my own biased view though, so take it with a grain of salt - there's folks who want more humor, only isometric, more complex and branching storylines, etc.

It’s hard to compare sales numbers of 90s games to late 2000s games lol the whole industry had a massive growth spike post-Xbox introduction and PCs getting massively cheaper to build

I was skeptical of the jump to 3D at the time, and sure, it changed the series, but I think that it was done well.

If one wants more isometric games in the rough setting and genre as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, there's the Wasteland series, the first of which inspired Fallout.

checks

The series is apparently currently on sale on Steam. Wasteland 3 and its expansions are 80% off:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/

And Wasteland 2 is 75% off:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/

...and the latter is bundled with the (very, very elderly) Wasteland 1.

I'd be curious to see the sale results of the games while takeling the amount of console/PC present as well as the market size during the release year.

We might have surprise about results of all the games with these parameters.