Actually it went under because of extremely poor management. Fallout had nothing to do with it.

From what I remember Van Buren was nearly finished before it was cancelled in favor of Fallout Brotherhood of Steel and all competent employees were gone. Again their poor management.

Perhaps not linear in world design, but in terms of story and choices? It's extremely linear compared to the other Fallout games. Hell look at Fallout 3 MQ or Skyrim MQ vs New Vegas MQ

Edit: Others know the deal about Interplay and Black Isle far better than I do.

Yeah but Broken Steel, wich lead you beyond the original ending was more of a band aid to the mess the original one was and to attend to the demand of the consumers.

In New Vegas they`ve manage to screw this up even futher by even leaving unique items dropped by the last boss wich, I for one, felt fustrated and unsatisfied with its ending as well.

Fallout New Vegas, also in my opinion, was better then Fallout 3 in gameplay true, but storywise ? same [censored].

Fallout had everything to do with it. The fact is the format has been in popular decline for a very long time and if management would have been better then they would have turned Fallout into something that we don't consider FO in order to be successful and you'd be in the same boat anyway.

A true Fallout game could EASILY support a studio, but a true Fallout game could never support cupidity.

NIS America creates the Disgea series that is about as niche and abstruse as a series can get and has continued to create a critically acclaimed series while their games sell less than 500,000 copies world wide each.Success isn't solely monetary and shouldn't be measured exclusively in dollar bills, or sales of a product.

Sales should never suspend ridicule and that's what you're implying, with the "rude to ask comment".

It's an odious notion that a studio like BGS, which makes games that are antithetical to the original Fallouts, knowingly and willingly gutted the IP of its soul and subsumed it into essentially the TES ethos.