Fallout co-creator Tim Cain is now out of retirement—sort of. After five years of remote consultancy work for Obsidian and some other unknown companies, Cain is now back in California working full-time for the Outer Worlds studio. In his latest YouTube video, he breaks down how those years went, how he feels about being back in an office compared to working remotely, and shares some insights all freelancers can relate to.
Between June 2020 and December 2025, Cain was in what he called semi-retirement. He was still working on games as a consultant, but as a freelance, remote contractor. After moving to Seattle, he couldn’t stay at Obsidian full time as it wasn’t prepared to have out-of-state employees.
“I’m not in charge of a project, I’m not a director,” Cain says. “You can think of it as more of a consultant. It’s like what I was doing in semi-retirement but exclusive, just for Obsidian, and a lot deeper.” Now, rather than just working on one part of a game or on one project for a fixed amount of time, he can really get into the weeds with people, and he’s much happier working this way.
“Remote work isn’t all sunshine and lollipops, and it doesn’t work for everybody. It just doesn’t,” he says when talking about why he’s glad to be back in a physical office. “If you think it does and you argue it does, I either think you don’t know all the data or you just want to stay remote for your own personal reasons, and you’re trying to turn it into a professional reason.”
What seems to be the best part of working alongside other developers for Cain is the fruitful conversations he can have. “Just in the last seven weeks, I’ve had so many interesting conversations with artists, level designers, narrative designers, system mechanics guys, and even one person who primarily does audio stuff,” he says. “These conversations would never have happened over a video call. How do I know? Because they never happened over video calls.”
It does seem that part of why these conversations never happened over video calls is because he was a contractor, rather than purely because he was remote. He says previously, people worried about how many hours were left on his contract, so they may be put off asking him for help on a problem, but now devs can just message him on Slack, or he can pop into their office.
There are also other perks to being in an office, like bagel day. “Uncle Tim doesn’t need to eat a bagel every morning, but dang, Uncle Tim likes a bagel once a week,” he says. When you’ve got someone with as much experience as Cain, he can even help people with their game problems while queuing up for baked goods, so it’s easy to see why he prefers in-person work.
“I love this. I love it,” Cain says. “It’s what fits me well for this stage of my career. And I’d like to think I’m helping out a lot of people in their stages of their careers. That’s what unretirement is like for this guy.”
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