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Telltale Games is closing its doors

serra2

serra2

Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
Today, Telltale Games has laid off all but 25 of their employees without severance, with the understanding that the remaining employees will finish off Walking Dead Season 4. Needless to say, all future projects are cancelled, so rip A Wolf among Us 2 and Stranger Things

Major layoffs hit Telltale Games, upcoming games may be cancelled

Article:
Telltale Games, the studio behind The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Tales From the Borderlands, and numerous other popular adventure games, has reportedly undergone another major round of layoffs. According to The Verge, the studio has been reduced to around 25 employees, down from a peak of around 400 last year.

Telltale has not yet commented on the matter, but multiple developers on Twitter have reported losing their jobs. Narrative designer Emily Grace Buck, whose credits include Telltale's Batman and Guardians of the Galaxy games, tweeted for information about game development jobs "for a lot of other amazing people I love dearly."

According to USgamer, the 25 employees that remain will work to finish The Walking Dead: Final Season—the second episode is actually due out next week—but The Wolf Among Us Season 2, and the Stranger Things project revealed earlier this year are not going to happen. The site said Telltale has also filed for bankruptcy. I've reached out to Telltale for more information and will update when I receive a reply.


Statement from Telltale
 
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Fuck Kevin Bruner, man. Telltale had a brilliant cast of writers and devs. Once they'd tasted the tiniest bit of success, management expanded the studio to a size it couldn't maintain, took on a dozen different big IPs with holders breathing down their necks, and put said writers and devs through non-stop crunchtime until they all burned out and left. It started before he took over sure, but he ramped it up to the max. Damn near everything the guy did was the textbook definition of mismanagement, and when the company finally ditched him he had the audacity to sue. And then he goes around saying "I didn't want this to happen, they should've listened."

I doubt Telltale would ever replicate the success of TWD Season 1, but they could've done a lot more. It was fascinating (and sad) watching the decline in game quality. TWD S2 and Wolf Among Us weren't as good as the first Walking Dead, but they were okay. Then the games just kept getting worse and worse, and by New Frontier you could clearly see them going "oh shit we need to tie up this loose end" with the time crunch getting to them. God.

It's a shame we're not getting TWAU 2, but everyone knew Telltale was going down. Hopefully this doesn't impact the final season of TWD too badly (spoiler: it will.) For all the company's problems, Telltale's The Walking Dead is probably my favorite game of all time.
 
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I'm just disappointed this means they never will get the chance to revisit Sam and Max for a Season 4.
 
In case anyone was actually surprised by this news, have a pretty graph. Stolen from reddit.


Only Steam numbers, but I can't imagine they were that much better for consoles. Quality kept slipping, people weren't buying into the expensive licenses they bought, and things generally weren't working. They bought fairly cheap comic book licenses for their most successful games, TWD and Wolf Among Us, and then went for incredibly big names (Marvel, GoT, Batman) that they couldn't handle.
 
Article:
Update 4 [4:12pm]: As information continues to come out of today's announcement that Telltale Games is closing, and particularly in light of Telltale's statement, there are new revelations to the situation at Telltale.

We previously reported that a skeleton crew will remain behind to complete work on The Walking Dead Final Season. That information was inaccurate. Sources who wish to remain anonymous explained that there is a skeleton crew at Telltale, but they will be working on the Minecraft Story Mode project for Netflix. In fact, The Walking Dead team was also laid off today and The Walking Dead Final Season will not be completed.

This matches with the statement issued by Telltale games where the company promised to "fulfill the company's obligations to its board and partners." Our sources say The Walking Dead Final Season is set to end after the second episode launches next week.
 
According to Mike Futter, Telltale might not actually be shutting down entirely. No bankruptcy filings have been uncovered, the CEO has said that they aren't shutting down and more news will follow. Also, Netflix apparently went back and edited out the mention in their announcement about Telltale shutting down. Futter's also said not to trust the USGamer story, although I don't know enough about games journalism to know if there's a reason for that.

I'm hoping that this is a bit of confusion and TFS isn't cancelled. If it is, I'm out 10 bucks.

we thought telltale was gonna kill clem but she got them first

edit: Telltale CEO liked the tweet saying not to trust the USG story, i'm grasping at straws but this one seems pretty firm.
 
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I'm not surprised, those licenses must have been expensive. Batman 1 was fun, but I haven't bothered getting season 2...
 
Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers - The Verge

So this is an older article made back in March, which really goes to show how terrible management at TellTale really is back then. To put the issues in bulletpoints (it's a good article, go read it anyways):

1. Hired en masse to help with deadlines and fired to cut costs.
2. Working around 20 hours a day (100 hours a week).
3. Pursuing more licenses to expand and satisfy investors.
4. "We went from a small and scrappy team to kind of a giant studio full of 300-plus people," says former Telltale programmer and designer Andrew Langley, who worked at the studio from 2008 to 2015. "You walk around the office, and you don't really recognize anybody anymore."
5. Kevin Bruner, co-creator of TellTale was like that the head honcho who made LA Noire, abrasive and micromanaged everything, referred to as 'the Eye of Sauron.'

The video game industry is an industry that takes the young and passionate, puts them into the grinder, and chews them out. This is why TellTale is as is today.
 
Article said:
We previously reported that a skeleton crew will remain behind to complete work on The Walking Dead Final Season. That information was inaccurate. Sources who wish to remain anonymous explained that there is a skeleton crew at Telltale, but they will be working on the Minecraft Story Mode project for Netflix. In fact, The Walking Dead team was also laid off today and The Walking Dead Final Season will not be completed.
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Well, looks like Telltale couldn't just come to a close without making one last terrible decision. I mean, finishing a Minecraft project for goddamn Netfilx? Instead of finishing their most popular IP? The fuck?
 
Hykal94 said:
Super Best Friends did an LP. Its hilarious.

(but really tho Game of Thrones was utter shite how do you mess up GoT that bad)
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GoT was pretty much everything wrong with Telltale in a nutshell. Because there was no way the VAs or the License where cheap but man you can tell that this was the absolute lowest priority project for them.
 
serra2 said:

Man, this is kind of awful and scummy.
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It's also just fucking incompetent.

Like, Telltale has apparently been upscaling up until this collapse, despite the fact that this has been coming for a while now. The shear level of stupidity it takes to decide that upscaling a failing company is a good decision boggles the mind.

Like, what? Where they expecting a fortune to manifest from thin fucking air, or something? Who the fuck was balancing their budget?

The worst part of this absolute dumpster fire of stupid is that it's going to be all these now-jobless devs who did nothing wrong who pay the price, instead of the morons at the top who deserve this. Those idiots probably have a golden parachute (or at least a bronze one) ready to go.
 
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TheMagisKing said:
It's also just fucking incompetent.

Like, Telltale has apparently been upscaling up until this collapse, despite the fact that this has been coming for a while now. The shear level of stupidity it takes to decide that upscaling a failing company is a good decision boggles the mind.

Like, what? Where they expecting a fortune to manifest from thin fucking air, or something? Who the fuck was balancing their budget?

The worst part of this absolute dumpster fire of stupid is that it's going to be all these now-jobless devs who did nothing wrong who pay the price, instead of the morons at the top who deserve this. Those idiots probably have a golden parachute (or at least a bronze one) ready to go.
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I think you're being a bit unfair to Telltale's current management, tbh. The current management came on in early-mid 2017, when Telltale was already pretty screwed. Since then, they've refocused and downsized somewhat (they had a round of layoffs earlier this year, I think.) It seemed to be working, Enemy Within was apparently pretty good and the first episode of TFS was great, but they just ran out of time or money. Things collapsing so quickly - Telltale was acting like everything was normal right up to the end - seems to suggest that a deal or contract that they were relying on to keep the company afloat fell through, leaving them without much choice.

Telltale's original management - the guys who chose to stick with a buggy, outdated engine that required absurd amounts of work, who pumped out tons of quantity over quality games that didn't sell, and who kept expanding while the company bled money - rightfully deserve some blame, but the current management was trying to salvage a bad situation. In a few months we'll probably know more when some gaming magazine does a post-mortem, but I think they just ran out of cash a little too early.
 
Teen Spirit said:
GoT was pretty much everything wrong with Telltale in a nutshell. Because there was no way the VAs or the License where cheap but man you can tell that this was the absolute lowest priority project for them.
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It was fascinating to see a studio basically try to get by on pure name recognition. A lot of the time the merits of their games seemed to boil down to 'Telltale made it' and 'it's a big media licence.'
 
I swore off on Telltale's stuff after the first Batman one (having been railroaded regarding Harvey Dent) but I never really wished for the company to collapse around the ears of its most vulnerable workers.
 
Ford Prefect said:
It was fascinating to see a studio basically try to get by on pure name recognition. A lot of the time the merits of their games seemed to boil down to 'Telltale made it' and 'it's a big media licence.'
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Biggest sticking point was when Ramsey killed the Ironborn son. When some fucking psycho kills a major family member and tries to kidnap another, it is time for every man,woman,child,dog,horse,cow and mouse to suicide charge the bastard and toss his head over Winterfell's walls. You kill our son, we kill your house.
 
Must admit that I got terribly confused at wondering how a hyped-up game from E3 2018 was getting canceled unceremoniously... until a friend pointed out that "Stranger Things" is that one show, and the actual game I was thinking of was "Life Is Strange".
 
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