Telltale Games Lays Off Majority Of Staff, Begins Process Of Shutting Down

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From CinemaBlend:

Over the last six years there has been a huge resurgence in story-based point-and-click games all thanks to Telltale Games. The company got eyes with the return of Sam & Max but it turned heads with the first season of The Walking Dead. The follow-up of The Wolf Among Us kept fans hanging on for more content from Telltale Games, and with successes like Batman: The Enemy Within, many thought that the company was going to be making headway toward bigger and better things, but alas it was not meant to be. After swapping out the CEO, restructuring the entire studio and culling a lot of properties from the line-up, things still didn’t turn around for Telltale, and now the company is shutting down.

Telltale Games

@telltalegames

Over on the official Telltale Twitter account, the company announced that it was letting go of all its staff, save for 25 employees who will stay on to finish work on open projects. _US Gamer is reporting that everyone who was let go from the studio did so without severance pay. As for _The Talking Dead: The Final Season, the second episode is due to drop on September 28th, with the remaining episodes scheduled to arrive before 2018 wraps up. However Variety is reporting that it’s “uncertain” if the remaining episodes will release as scheduled.

. . . .

Additionally, there’s no guarantee that Telltale will shut down indefinitely. It could be one of those situations where the studio is looking for an angel investor or another buyer who will pick up the intellectual properties currently under the company’s developmental deal with the rights holders. This could be a reason why Telltale signed on with Netflix earlier in the year even though the company was in dire straits. Sometimes having valuable IP under the belt helps improve the overall valuation of the company and makes it look worthwhile for potential buyers.

Of course, this is all assuming that Telltale won’t just file for bankruptcy and sell off all of its remaining properties in the process.

This all comes after a studio restructuring last year in 2017, in which Telltale laid off 25% of its staff during a restructuring.

Link to the rest at CinemaBlend and thanks to Felix, who says Telltale’s “generally acclaimed games were everything tradpub dreams to turn interactive ebooks into” for the tip.

22 thoughts on “Telltale Games Lays Off Majority Of Staff, Begins Process Of Shutting Down”

  1. Even then it wasn’t enough to stave off some hard decisions during these tough times.

    Tough times regarding video games? The entertainment industry that is now literally bigger than Hollywood? If they were talking comic books I might buy this, but vidya? Does not compute.

  2. “Over the last six years there has been a huge resurgence in story-based point-and-click games all thanks to Telltale Games.”

    But not a big enough resurgence to keep Telltale Games going?

    • Most story-based point and click games are made for casual gamers, by cheapie games companies based in Eastern Europe somewhere.

      So if you live in Eastern Europe, but you make sweet sweet cash in the US, Canada, etc., you have a very favorable money exchange rate.

      If Telltale Games had not been based in California, they probably would have had a harder time getting licenses, but an easier time making dough and paying the bills. The pay might have looked lower, but been of more value to the employees (with a lower cost of living). Heck, if they’d been able to avoid CA regulations, that would have saved a lot of moolah.

      But even putting the HQ somewhere expensive, and the work somewhere cheap, would have made a big difference.

  3. 8.5Million episodes and $40M the first year.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/01/07/telltale-reveals-impressive-sales-for-the-walking-dead/#6e47e66d6dbb

    “Critical darling and, apparently, massive commercial success. Telltale Games’ “The Walking Dead” has received top awards from a multitude of gaming websites for its emotionally affecting, episodic story of survival and family in the zombie apocalypse, and now we’re getting some idea of just how many people have tuned in. According to a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Telltale’s Dan Connors says that the game has sold more than 8.5 million episodes – more than $40 million in sales.

    The article notes that this shows the rising importance of tablets and mobile devices in the gaming sphere – Connors says that while console is still key to the company’s strategy, mobile is growing quickly. But I don’t think that’s the most important way that “The Walking Dead” is going to impact game development in the short term. People have been talking about episodic content for years, and this could be the game that finally propels it to a mainstream development choice. ”

    For contrast, the most recent Halo game sold 5M units generating over $400M at launch.

    “Halo is a shooter franchise for Microsoft’s Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. With development costs of over $100 million, it is one of the most expensive games ever made. As of July 13th, 2015 Microsoft has sold over 70 million Halo games since its 2001 inception.[1] The release of Halo 5: Guardians on October 27th, 2015 pushed Halo’s lifetime sales pass $5 billion.”

    • As I remember it, 2013-2015 was sort of the heyday for the TV series. Really hit a cliff after the first episode of Season 7 and then interest has dropped off from there. One has to expect an even greater corresponding burnout/disinterest on the interactive game side which seems to appeal more to casual gamers. Anyone playing “The Last of Us”, “Dead by Daylight”, or “Killing Floor 2” probably has little interest while being a main demographic for Walking Dead.

      • Walking Dead was hardly their only product.
        They did Game of Thrones, Tales from the Borderlands, Batman, Back to the Future etc. Lots of licensed products.
        Tales of the Borderlands was definitely not targeted at casual gamers.

        https://telltale.com/series/

        And their market wasn’t limited to mobile as they also ran on Steam, XBOX, and Playstation. They just didn’t rely on $60 disk releases.

        Their business model had quite a few things in common with Indie publishing; low prices, episodic content, and free first episode promos.

  4. “We made millions … but we’re filing for bankruptcy anyway.”

    I don’t have time to read more into this, but that’s what I’m understanding.

    • They’re not filing for bankruptcy (yet) and technically, they’re still developing one new game. They actually made a couple hundred million.

      They just didn’t make enough to stay in business.

      Just as with interactive books, the issue isn’t that there is no market for the product. It’s that the market that exists isn’t big enough to cover the cost of staying in the business. There’s just enough of a market to convince player after player that *they* can make a go of it. Someday somebody will. Maybe.

      Not yet, though.

      • There is a lot more to this than that. Part of it was that they created a toxic environment, treating their devs badly. Part of it was poor investments and expanding too rapidly. They also didn’t improve, just kept the same episodic formula over numerous IPs and never updated their engine. It actually hurt some of their stories.

        Most of the gamers I know aren’t at all sad to see Telltale go for another reason: they started getting too involved in identity politics, with diversity hires rather than ones based on merit. Not the biggest problem they had, but certainly doesn’t help their sales.

        Storywise, Telltale had a good thing, but they screwed themselves over by taking the success of The Walking Dead and trying to replicate it as the expense of everything else, rather than continuing to break new ground. Basic tradpub behaviour, really.

        I think that had they taken a different path they probably would have stayed in business. Instead they will most likely be remembered for a few good games and a class action lawsuit for violating the WARN act.

        • Gamers on social media and identity politics are a toxic mix. I’m not sure I’d believe either side in those “gamergate” catfights.

          • My recommendation would be to believe both sides when they talk about their opponents, and not when they talk about themselves.

          • Eh. I fall on the gamer side. And the side of the comics fans in comicsgate, and the open source users in the current Code of Conduct issue. I have a gamer sister who was following events as they happened, I know people involved in the comics drama and I’m following the CoC stuff with interest myself, as well as the political sphere in general. It’s the same damned pattern that sees people in publishing coming up with ideas like a year of only female submissions to break the male domination of the industry. Completely divorced from what’s actually going on and the reasons behind it.

            Yeah, there are plenty of scum who take advantage and hurl abuse, on both sides. But the vast majority of those whose interests are being targeted had no issue with these identitarians until they made themselves an issue. Certainly in gaming and open source, it’s meritocracy that matters, not immutable traits. Most don’t care if new games/comics/software are made catering to these people, they just don’t want the stuff they are interested in messed up. And if the stuff they don’t like flops because no one really wants it, they don’t want to be blamed for not supporting stuff they aren’t interested in. And that’s why they lash out, because that’s exactly what is happening.

            I note that was only one paragraph of my comment, and the one I said wasn’t the biggest issue at that. 😉

  5. I confess I have generally little interest in the story-based games, partly as few are done particularly well. Either the game mechanics are rudimentary, or the pace is off, or the story is so overblown that it doesn’t really pass the suspension of disbelief test for the mechanics and aestethics of the release.

    But danged if I didn’t see an ad for a CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE style app a few weeks ago and thought I would try it. It’s in chapters, tells a story of a medieval servant and a princess whose kingdom is taken by force, and throughout the first chapter, you get to see the dialogue and some comic-book style scenes (static, not dynamic), and are asked questions. Do you slap the oaf or defer to his crown? Do you say something nice to the servant boy or do you dismiss him out of hand? Each chapter has “playability” built into it…some choices give you alliances you need for later, others make you enemies you may regret later. And at the end of the chapter, a “score” tells you how you did against the perfect storyline.

    It’s pretty rudimentary, a little rough, and more clicking than necessary. There should be more “cels” from the comics where multiple lines of dialogue are shown at once, rather than clicking after each, but I confess, it wasn’t bad. Normally I would delete it, but I left it on and may do some later.

    Regardless, there is a market for this interactive fiction, more so than the current news would indicate, and the person who nails the game mechanics properly with a balance between gamification and aesthetics is going to be able to replicate any content with a simple programming framework. An ideal world for comic-book creators or indies with a more creative flare than simply a book or a short-story.

    I was pleasantly impressed. I also tend to think non-licensed IP, more original creations, are going to rule the day — the margins are going to be small, but if you’re a game manufacturer and you can basically hand over a game environment that anyone can populate with basic decision tree outcomes for content, you become the Amazon of interactive fiction.

    There are some great examples out there, but in my limited experience, I feel the platform gets in the way of the reading experience still. This simple mobile app went a long way to getting out of the way…not quite there, but close.

    P.

    • That is very similar to the standard Telltale gameplay.

      Check the download store for your device of choice for one of their free episodes. (google play is one option.) If fantasy appeals to you, THE WOLF AMONG US would be the one to check out.
      Their games rely on QuickTime Events more than clicks so a minimum of timing skill is needed during action sequences.

      Or for a modern take on the classic graphic adventure games, look into the Syberia Series.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syberia

  6. And I fondly remember Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of Lounge Lizards. Doesn’t get much better than that.

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