I can not answer that question from the perspective of someone who writes/develops games, but I can tell you, what I feel.
And I think that the ending - bad or good, depends on what game I’m playing.
For example, in one of the last games of HG - Highlands, Deep Waters - I was very surprised that the game could have a more or less good ending! Lovecraft never did it in his books. But the tone for the bad ending was set from the very beginning, the setting of the game, its mood, everything led us to the fact that you can somewhere die.
Then we have Empyrean - a good game that just did not “click” for me. I was not interested in the characters and most of them I would like to punch in the face. It’s logical that I did not get a good ending, which I wanted, because I was too angry and did not pay attention to the details. But I was not feeling upset - because the game did not really interest me, the bad ending also did not greatly affect me.
The third example I want to take are our favorite games The Lost Heir and Choice of rebels. I must admit that I did not live to see the normal endings in them - I was killed, cut, I was dying of hunger and all that. Not that I was not invested in games - I was, but my lack of understanding of the details due to lack of knowledge of the language (English - is not my native language) led to the fact that I simply did not have time to navigate under the new conditions and, as a result, was dying. But in the case of TLH, I felt frustrated and wanted to replay it to get a normal end, because the story interested me. So I did, Repeatedly. Then I just cheated and looked at the code - and that solved all my problems. In the case of COF, I did not do this, because the characters and the story itself did not interested me. Story seems to me a little naive and simple, while the mechanics is cluttered with unnecessary realism.
As for the ending of the video games … everything is complicated. I have repeatedly cited the endings of Mass effect 3 and Life is strange, since I really believe that these games have suffered terribly because of them. Some fan theories sound more logical than what I saw on the screen. This was a weak work of the writers and nothing more. Maybe money was a factor too. However, in the games Outlast and Outlast 2 , the death of the protagonist seems quite logical and predictable - considering what we had to go through.
To summarize, I want to say that it seems to me that the basis of a good ending for the game (even if you die at the end) will be:
- Logic
- Following the setting of the game (if you write about rainbow ponies, you do not need to inject bloody zombies on the last pages of the book)
- Good written story and characters