Telltale games to fully shut down after laying off over 250 employees.

[marvelvscapcom2]

Today is a sad sad day everyone . 

I haven't found many game companies to have ever putten me on a roller coaster of emotions with sheer brilliant story telling the way telltale has continuously done.  The final season of the walking dead is not even halfway released but the first episode leaves so much of what could have been.  I have grown to love many of the characters. And part of the story has honestly shaped me as a person. I feel interlaced with the company and have been a huge supporter since their inception.  This day I never thought would come and i'm honestly not handeling it as well as i'd assume I would with any game dev.   I just can't imagine.   It sure was a ride 



The fate of tfs is still unknown but it would really hurt not to see the final ending the game series deserves. I'm not sure if 3 and 4 episodes are still in beta phase but I really hope they can still release it as I have already pre paid.


Today I mourn and I cry. 


I have a decent idea as to why they went under.  Awful marketing, terrible business practices (Like giving your game out for free multiple times) the game being priced at 20 dollars makes it less lucrative than the 60 USD games of course.  And they really must have paid out the wazzoo in licensing these big names. 


What game company that went defunct hurt you the most in your life?   Weather old or new?

[Nickkchilla]

The news also mentioned keeping about 25 employees as a "skeleton crew" in order to finish up certain projects. Hopefully The Walking Dead is one of those projects.

[kamikazekeeg]

The news also mentioned keeping about 25 employees as a "skeleton crew" in order to finish up certain projects. Hopefully The Walking Dead is one of those projects.

It's being said that Walking Dead is canceled, but that's something official quite yet. 

I have to wonder if the formula Telltale cemented with Walking Dead is what maybe lead to this in the long run.  To me and from reviews I read, the games were all generally the same, the same type of release schedule, same bugs and looks a lot of the time, just with a different story.  Not much in the way of progression and overall improvement in the games or genre itself.  I really liked Walking Dead Season 1, but after that, I thought those games didn't hit the same emotional impact, while also not being any different to play and I never found a lot of interest in Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands and never made it past their first episodes.

Combine elements like that with their episodic release schedule, which does push people towards buying the game day one, but instead to wait for release, wait to hear how good it may be, and then most likely just wait on a sale...something like that could be a factor, especially when dealing with big licenses like they had.  We won't know for a while till the smoke clears and people start talking about what went down, but it would be interesting to see if this was a factor or if the company was just mismanaged.  Looking at a lawsuit that showed up this year from a former CEO and co-founder seems to lend some credence to that.

[mark1982]

Read this new earlier as well, unfortunate indeed. A skeleton crew is no joke, seems like just to hold whatever obligations they have for their existing titles...

I read elsewhere a series of possible reasons too, also the idea that people just watch Let's Plays of Tell Tale Games on Youtube instead of actually buying the game... which I think is odd because their games are usually pretty cheap as the OP stated.

As for the last question on which closure has affected me the most. Not really a studio shutting down, but just a forgotten franchise. Legacy of Kain... still hurts that there is no love for this franchise in the modern market. Look at God Of War, a successful single player story driven action game, Crystal Dynamics please take note and revive it already. ( And no, the MMO Nosgoth doesn't count, it can burn in a dumpster fire... )

[ffxik]

I had heard this, I wasn't a fan of most of their games.  The Back to the Future game I enjoyed quite a bit.  For those that enjoyed their content I could see why this would be a dark day.

[marvelvscapcom2]

The news also mentioned keeping about 25 employees as a "skeleton crew" in order to finish up certain projects. Hopefully The Walking Dead is one of those projects.

TellTale has released a few updates.  Turns out they got unspecified developers hopping on board with the interest of bringing the final season to a close.  Nothing is confirmed yet.  But many people have rumored the dev to be either Valve, Ubisoft, Skybound or Microsoft studios.   A few of which I hope but doubt.   

It seems like their might be life though.  I just really hope some huge company buys out telltale's IPs and pays to get the staff back and takes a swing at it.  The games garner interest.  It's just when you have PewDiePie spoling your entire game in front of millions.  Especially a game so story based it makes it a waste to even buy it.  Combine that with the game being only 20 instead of 40 or 60.   Then paying out the wazoo to purchase the rights to the name sakes of walking dead, batman, minecraft.  I can imagine how costly it was.

[Cartagia]

It seems like their might be life though.  I just really hope some huge company buys out telltale's IPs and pays to get the staff back and takes a swing at it.  The games garner interest.  It's just when you have PewDiePie spoling your entire game in front of millions.  Especially a game so story based it makes it a waste to even buy it.  Combine that with the game being only 20 instead of 40 or 60.   Then paying out the wazoo to purchase the rights to the name sakes of walking dead, batman, minecraft.  I can imagine how costly it was.

You hit the nail on the head after kind of contradicting yourself.  Telltale doesn't actually own any IPs to sell off.  They spent a ton of money to license these games from some pretty heavy hitters.  A second company would have to want to want to make the same kind of games, hire people to make them and then negotiate and pay a third party for a company for an IP for a series of games that was so unprofitable that the previous studio shut down.  There's a slim chance of it happening while Telltale is still open and has the licenses, but there is a snowball's chance in hell of it happening after they close.

I think another big money sink was the size of the company - almost 300 people to write and code story based games that have been running on the same engine for nigh on 10 years?  That's a lot of people.  You see much other companies putting out story based games on similar engines with much smaller dev teams.

[kamikazekeeg]

While Telltale is gone now, anyone who had the final season of Walking Dead and thought it would go unfinished, apparently another developer worked out a deal to finish it up. https://twitter.com/skyboundgames/status/1048735364452634626

[justin8301]

Looks like Skybound is getting Walking Dead at least!! It's rather fitting if you ask me!