What is up next for Telltale games?

And lawsuit filled against Telltale for breaking labor laws.

Interesting. I would assume if you run a company of 300 people, you should probably know about stuff like this WARN act?

And if they win the lawsuit, but the company has no funds with which to pay, what then?

Yeah, I think the legal term for a company like Telltale is “turnip.”

This happens a lot in this industry. Usually, stuff like pay owed to ex-employees takes precedence during the bankruptcy sale, but in this case, I’m not sure there’s any value for buyers. I imagine most of the Telltale value was tied up in licensing deals they don’t own.

Well that sounds pretty cut and dried given the definitions laid out by the California law. It also pretty much effectively kills any chance that what remains of Telltale will finish the Walking Dead episodes because no outside investor is going to sink money into a company that’s the target of a lawsuit like that.

Looks like the final season of Walking Dead has been pulled from all digital stores.

Yeah, it’s hard to justify continuing to sell a product that’s likely to remain half what you’re charging for.

Next up: Steam and GOG will probably have to respond to a deluge of refund requests. That’s going to be fun.

There’s some interesting, and pretty angry, responses to this whole debacle on the most recent Waypoint.

I think the most poignant comment of all was how she noted that Telltale seemed to be making games with heart and an eye to the human condition while completely ignoring those values as a company in the real world. Seems indicative of the “late-stage capitalism” phrase that’s taken wing recently.

Ben Kuchera, otoh, blames the engine.

I would say it was part old clunky engine, part market saturation (at some point they were releasing parts of three stories on the same year, cannibalizing sales), part release-economic model (people waiting until all the episodes were out, and that point, you could just wait two months more and get it by half the original price), and part lack of evolution in their formula. Same engine yes, but also same mechanics, same limited freedom which barely counted as an illusion (people fell for the ‘xx will remember this’ on their first Telltale game, but not more).

Having a judgment is not the same as being able to execute a judgment. That’s why poor people and bankrupt companies don’t get sued more often.

It might also be worth comparing - although i don’t think there is any data easily available for it, i’m not sure? if Sony breaks down title sales in their financial reports - for the David Cage games (Heavy Rain, Twin Souls, Detroit) or the recent Sony horror game Until Dawn. These are narrative heavy and pretty well received and seem to be successful.

Narrative games that are truly linear really are one-shot things that can be eaten up by Youtube Let’s Players. Narrative games that have significant branching narratives, otoh, seem to be more “proof” against Youtube exploitation. (I actually feel that Let’s Players probably should have an easy license deal with game developers, like some % of income.)

From everything I can read, on a strategic level, the studio’s business model was positioning and selling their game projects to financiers as marketing opportunities. At some point, the heads of Telltale just accepted that their games were never going to make money off the audience directly as games.

Crazy.

Like I said above…

Yea, great quote that makes sense. That’s the underlying “flavor” of Telltale that i’ve been trying to describe; a corporate suit saying “hello fellow kids” behind it all.

First it sounded like it was Lionsgate pulling out that killed Telltale, but now throw in AMC and… Smilegate? A Korean mobile publisher?

That sort of thing happens all the time to independent studios, they live hand to mouth, miss a single contract and they go under, screwing all their employees. Obsidian almost met the same fate. What is so different about Telltale?

I don’t want to dance on their grave, and I also don’t know exactly how much their tech problems were to blame for their downfall, but it does feel good to have someone bring it up again.

I know I complained about it back when I played Tales from the Borderlands and I still can’t believe how bad it was when I think back on it, even though I did end up enjoying the experience overall.

And the engine, in general, made the characters look stilted and lifeless, which could hurt how well the story and dialogue landed.

“It’s common for said issues to undercut an effective joke, one that hit the mark in both script and voiceover, but falls flat because the game can’t swap between scenes fast enough, leaving long pauses in-between snappy character banter,” Klepek wrote. “Dead air can be funny when used on purpose, but here, it’s only awkward silence.”

When the worst parts of your game work against the best parts of your game — in this case, the company’s technology often harming how well the stories were told — the only thing that’s left is a mediocre experience. It’s no wonder that players began to stay away.

Amen, amen, amen.

The king of bad cuts in recent memory was AC: Origins. So so bad. So many scenes or sentences load cut away, sometimes back to back.