Telltale Games is Closing - The Bear and Badger

Bob

Sad times.

Never played one of their games myself but always assumed they sold well with the big name IP they had.

hylian_elf

Sad. Walking Dead was amazing. Season 1 anyway. Don’t think I’ve played any of their other games yet. I do have them downloaded.

acemuzzy

Sad for those involved, I thought their games did ok - played a couple and kinda enjoyed them well enough, despite their saminess

Kow

I've played most of their stuff and Wolf Among Us is the best of them, a really great game.

acemuzzy

Think I preferred Tales from the Borderlands, but aye some decent output

regmcfly

Their output and sustainability was not gonna be successful. It's a shame because they've really upped their game recently.

Dark Soldier

Apparently they only made profit on the first series of The Walking Dead

hunk

I have most of their games as well.
Shame as I liked most of their output.

Yossarian

Sounds like they fucked their staff over pretty hard too.

https://twitter.com/emilybuckshot/status/1043321927299813377?s=20

yourfavouriteuncle

Weren’t they owned (or perhaps just managed) by a horrible ginormous dick who thought his staff were work shy shits and behaved accordingly? Working practices were completely broken I think, with never enough of the right people in the right places.

Can’t remember where I read all this but it didn’t paint a pretty picture and this is going back about 12 months.

Still, rubbish for all involved and they seemed like they were trying to rectify their poor choices of the past.

acemuzzy

Yossarian wrote:

Sounds like they fucked their staff over pretty hard too.

https://twitter.com/emilybuckshot/status/1043321927299813377?s=20

Pretty shitty though I guess these things are unlikely to ever end well.

I don't understand "on contract -> can't get unemployment", guess that's us shit though?

Tempy

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

Weren’t they owned (or perhaps just managed) by a horrible ginormous dick who thought his staff were work shy shits and behaved accordingly? Working practices were completely broken I think, with never enough of the right people in the right places.

Can’t remember where I read all this but it didn’t paint a pretty picture and this is going back about 12 months.

Still, rubbish for all involved and they seemed like they were trying to rectify their poor choices of the past.

Sounds like this article: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry

tigersgogrrr

The games were poor, I thought. Sad for employees, as ever, but I didn't rate anything I played (which was literally only TWD and GoT, to be fair).

Stopharage

tigerswiftly wrote:

The games were poor, I thought. Sad for employees, as ever, but I didn't rate anything I played (which was literally only TWD and GoT, to be fair).

I think that's a bit unfair but totally understand the perspective; the gameplay was poor, but the stories invariably weren't. Wolf and WD were especially good. But they just repeated the same format game-in, game-out. As such, there was no real incentive to ever purchase another Telltale game - you knew exactly what you were getting. Unless you were a franchise fanboy there was a growing suspicion that if you waited long enough it would either be an XBL/PSN freebie, so why bother purchasing? And the much-vaunted 'choose your own adventure' USP was far more limited in practice than initially hoped for.

b0r1s

Never got far in TWD, but loved the Wolf game and would’ve bought a sequel.

Paul the sparky

Stopharage wrote:

And the much-vaunted 'choose your own adventure' USP was far more limited in practice than initially hoped for.

The demo for TWD was a cynical con in that regard. Holy shit, I've just made a choice and now a character is dead, I wonder how keeping that guy alive will alter the story going forward...

*Buys game to find out*

...oh he's gone home thirty seconds into the main game and will never be seen or heard from again.

Rotten practice.

[Deleted User]

Stopharage wrote:

I think that's a bit unfair but totally understand the perspective; the gameplay was poor, but the stories invariably weren't.

I know a lot of people share this opinion. But when people talk about the story-telling in their games, it’s one of those situstions where I feel like a lot of people are drinking a fucktonne of kool aid. I don’t see it. At all.

I remember listening to the Cane & Rinse folk wittering on about The Wolf Among Us, and describing the most laughably on-the-nose tripe as though it was special. I bought Guardians of the Galaxy, and I haven’t been back, after they sucked the fun out of it. Game of Thrones was insufferably poor. The Walking Dead transparent. They drained the life and soul out of other people’s IPs with dismaying consistency.

I’m really, really sorry for the individuals concerned. I’d be fucked for the rest of my life if that happened to me, and I imagine it’s orders of magnitude worse in the US.

But, on an utterly selfish, pathetically shallow level, I’m glad there won’t be any more of their shite on PS+.

hunk

The quality of the scripts was mostly excelent imo. Just don't expect a whole lot of gamey interaction and intricate story branching. As long as you see them as qte graphic novels, there's nothing inherintly wrong with the games format. Don 't expect much replayability; like with film after you finish it once you're unlikely to ever touch it again.

They could and probably should've done more to push the genre forward. Their output still isn't bad if you see it for what it is.

Dark Soldier

Their stories make Life is Strange look like art they're that bad

RedDave2

Interesting comment in the twitter feed about the high cost of living in the bay area. I've seen other articles on it and it seems insane out there.

afgavinstan

Never enjoyed any of their output tbh. Sucks for the people involved, looks like they've been heavy shafted. Hope they all land on their feet.

Bob

Are they cats?

MattyJ

It felt like a classic case of having one success and then expanding way too fast. After Walking Dead came out they suddenly seemed to be making 20 different games.

tigersgogrrr

Stopharage wrote:

tigerswiftly wrote:

The games were poor, I thought. Sad for employees, as ever, but I didn't rate anything I played (which was literally only TWD and GoT, to be fair).

I think that's a bit unfair but totally understand the perspective; the gameplay was poor, but the stories invariably weren't. Wolf and WD were especially good. But they just repeated the same format game-in, game-out. As such, there was no real incentive to ever purchase another Telltale game - you knew exactly what you were getting. Unless you were a franchise fanboy there was a growing suspicion that if you waited long enough it would either be an XBL/PSN freebie, so why bother purchasing? And the much-vaunted 'choose your own adventure' USP was far more limited in practice than initially hoped for.

Perhaps. I've not really given them much of a chance and am not best placed to judge at all. The engine has always felt too clunky for my liking and the acting in GoT seemed very poor from the get go. As has been said, it seemed like they did something well in the first TWD and came across some unexpected success, then just tried to cash in, churning out more than they could cope with and not taking the time to work on the tech.

Again, perhaps unfair...

Tempy

As far as I know the GoT one was hailed as one of, if not the worst they’d done.

Highlights according to people who played them are TWD season one, Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands.

They definitely tried to do too much, but they had some good writers on board here and there. A bunch of ex-telltale devs worked on things like Oxenfree and Firewatch, so it seems like it’s a case of shitty management trying to turn a profit by pushing staff too far, with quality suffering as a result.

A friend of mine knows someone who had an interview there a few years ago. She turned it down because as she walked through the office to the interview someone was crying at their desk and everyone just ignored it.

acemuzzy

Wow

hunk

Again, I feel most of the scripts were fine as is as were the actors. (Yes even GoT)
If anything I felt they were way too unambitious with their format sticking rigidly to the qte graphic novel/tv mini series model. This is the medium of interactive entertainment afteral and I just felt they weren't pushing the boundaries as much as they could.

JonB

Stopharage wrote:

Unless you were a franchise fanboy there was a growing suspicion that if you waited long enough it would either be an XBL/PSN freebie, so why bother purchasing?

I wonder if this was a factor. Their stuff always seemed to be heavily reduced in sales and a lot of it has ended up given away on subscription services. Perhaps they should've valued it a bit more.

Anyway, I only ever played episode 1 of The Walking Dead and knew they weren't for me. Shit for those losing jobs though, obviously.

Kow

I played Wolf Among Us as an extension to the comics. It captured the art style and feel of the comic really well. While it probably didn't allow you to change the outcomes that much it was well enough written that it didn't matter. I treated it just like a slightly interactive comic and enjoyed it thoroughly in that way.

Nina

RedDave2 wrote:

Interesting comment in the twitter feed about the high cost of living in the bay area. I've seen other articles on it and it seems insane out there.

It's one of the worst in, at least, California, as far as I know. The tech industry there is crumbling, there are people that have to live in their cars to make by, even when they do have the fulltime job. In the regard it might be a good thing it's falling apart, it's no way of living.
Silicon Valley though, it's where the tech magic happens.

Petey might know more about it, pretty sure he is in the Bay area

b0r1s

A Telltale dev posted this on Twitter...

Re: I got laid off at Telltale

None of my sleepless nights or long hours on weekends trying to ship a game on time got me severance today. Don’t work overtime unless you’re paid for it, y’all. Protect your health. Companies don’t care about you.

Followed by 1,000 replies of union talk, people saying it’s business and other devs saying they haven’t been happier since leaving the gaming industry.

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