Reports today are saying that Telltale has effectively shut down - a skeleton staff of 25 are staying on to finish The Walking Dead but all new projects have been cancelled. There have been rumours of mismanagement around the company for some time, with too many new projects and an over-reliance on the creaking Telltale Tool as a game engine, but this is still quite a shock.
I'm pretty sad about this to be honest - I haven't played all their games by any stretch but I've enjoyed the first series of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones and recently Batman, and I was looking forward to the next series of TWAU which presumably won't now materialise. At heart they were enjoyable games, and although technically they were definitely falling behind, the quality of the writing and acting usually carried them through. Best of luck to all the staff involved.
Yeah it- it seems like there's been some fairly cataclysmic mismanagement going on there. I'm sure in a year or so there'll be some very interesting polygon articles about the clusterfuck but it's still a fairly miserable thing to read about.
That's disappointing. I had started a tradition of playing one of there games every Xmas a few years back.
Borderlands is my fav of their games. Is there any worry there games won't be available any longer on the online stores if they close?
Their only games I cared about were the Poker Night games. The other games were just story-heavy (hell, 99.9999999% story) crap that I would rather just watch a movie or TV for.
I haven't played all their games by any stretch
So many comments I've seen have said exactly the same thing. Sadly though (not a dig, Gar, just across the board), that's the problem - if games don't sell, developers close. Being a market leader or well-known in your genre means nothing if there's no market and the genre is niche. Imagine how much they spent on that licensing! And now it's gone, because people were happy knowing who Telltale was but didn't fancy actually buying the output.
Of course, that's how it works… definitely not complaining, it's how it should be. But I'm surprised so many people in the wider realm are acting… well, surprised. The writing's been on the wall for ages now.
And now it's gone, because people were happy knowing who Telltale was but didn't fancy actually buying the output.
It's hardly surprising that people would pick and choose, especially for narrative-heavy games that are so heavy on the licensing. I didn't play Minecraft: Story Mode or Tales From the Borderlands because I don't care for those franchises. But I bought Game of Thrones and Tales from Monkey Island as soon as they came out. Liking a dev's output doesn't mean you buy everything from them unquestioningly.
The bigger problem was the business model. Episodes would be released "when they were done", often months apart, killing any momentum in the narrative and any marketing push they'd managed to achieve. Often they'd launch a new game while purchasers of the previous title were still waiting for theirs to complete. Whole seasons would be heavily discounted before the second or third episodes were out, leading to early purchasers feeling like mugs. And pretty much everything they did ended up on PS+ or GwG eventually. They kind of positioned themselves as a budget studio, something you fill time with rather than look forward to, and once you've got that reputation it's hard to shift it.
a skeleton staff of 25 are staying on to finish The Walking Dead
I read a report that the remaining staff are working on Minecraft Story Mode, because of an outstanding contract with Netflix, and that The Walking Dead's final season will end after episode 2.
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