What is up next for Telltale games?

Holy shit, they aren’t even finishing the last season of Walking Dead!

I will miss them.

At least I have a large catalog of their games to still go through.

But I was really hoping to one day play Telltale’s Stranger Things game.

Hopefully wherever the developers of Telltale end up, maybe a heavy-story based studio similar to Telltale can be formed who makes similar style of games.

If all but two of their games lost money, that doesn’t seem like a strategy people are likely to be eager to emulate.

Hm.

There was a fair amount of ink spilled about Telltale’s management struggles, especially given their obvious over-expansion. I believe there was a management change after Walking Dead that ended up sacrificing a lot of morale and senior employees. A lot of the press around the Idle Thumbs/Campo Santo guys ended up touching on it, as IIRC both Jake Rodkin and Nick Breckon were lead writers on some of their higher profile games (Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us).

But, given the background from those stories, I can’t say I’m surprised by this. I’m a little surprised they fell so hard and so completely, but it was clear that their growth and size were unsustainable.

I could always count the Telltale games to go super cheap for Black Friday or some other event, or get for free as toss ins.

I hope this doesn’t seem like slamming Telltale when they’re down (and out), or like self-aggrandizement, but when we were working on Before the Storm we happened to look at SteamSpy/Charts numbers for the Telltale games and compared them to Life Is Strange 1. It’s REALLY surprising. Telltale games don’t appear to sell terribly well (and also don’t have players coming back to them much–not a huge surprise, but LiS does way better here).

These AREN’T sales numbers, they’re concurrent players, but if you look at the number of concurrent users for different Telltale games, it’s kind of sad:

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/319630,207610,675260,376870#3m

Again, all kinds of caveats to make when it comes to interpreting those numbers, but WAY fewer people play even the most popular Telltale games than play Life is Strange, a very similar title (at least on the surface) that’s been around longer than most of those TT titles.

I can totally buy that Telltale has never really been successful, since Walking Dead 1. Clearly they needed strong sales of the WD Final season in order to continue with their reconfiguration plan, and that just didn’t happen.

Any idea who may get assets? Telltale Tool engine may not be worth much commercially, but fanbase could use it to fix bugs and maybe do some closure fan episodes.

Their games did always seem to be on sale on Steam a lot. Like when the mom & pop restaurant down the street is always on Groupon.

Still, what a shame. Some of my absolute all-time favorites. Really liked the first two Walking Dead games, the Borderlands adventure game (enjoyed it 10x more than the Borderlands shooters) and Wolf Among Us.

Sad to hear. Hope that those affected manage to land on their feet.

For years I’ve wondered how Telltale made their expensive licensed IP, business model, and large studio size work together. Turns out the answer was, “They couldn’t.”

I guess I knew this subconsciously all along. In theory I was the perfect post-WD Telltale customer. I was a huge adventure game fan back in the day, and am a devotee of many of the IPs they used.

But in practice I seldom bought Telltale games. That’s because they seldom gave me anything I couldn’t get more of out of cheaper indy games (in terms of gameplay) or out of rewatching the actual main IP on Netflix or whatever (in terms of storytelling.) Telltale’s titles were solid, but never felt essential. A sobering lesson for anyone thinking of making licensed games in our current hyper-saturated media world.

Such sad news. I was really looking forward to The Wolf Among Us Season 2. I remember how excited I was when they revived Sam & Max back in the day and later Monkey Island. Even though those games didn’t match the legacy of the Lucas Arts classics, it helped lay a strong foundation for stronger future titles, including Wolf and Tales of the Borderlands, two of my favorite adventure games. Sad to see them leave so suddenly, especially with so much exciting work in the cooker. I hope everyone secures rewarding work ASAP. I wish Wolf 2 could’ve happened. :(

I saw this Steamspy capture over on Resetera, which painted a pretty grim picture of their post-The Walking Dead Season one performance. The studio’s titles released on heaps of platforms and they were working on so many huge IP contracts that I just assumed, despite the recent management issues, that the studio was doing well.

Here’s my ruthless, unfiltered perspective:

Telltale was basically a mid-tier franchise tie-in brand maker that made it big through some alignment of the stars… probably too big. They hired “up” and got some amazing talent, but were still aiming at mid-tier franchise brands. Even the best written licensed Star Wars Expanded Universe book ever is still just more Star Wars, and that kind of supermarket pulpy underbelly of their games just made them that much less interesting (to me).

LiS made me sniffle for the first time in 15 years. I’m a LiS’er for life. Despite “liking” Borderlands and certainly appreciating what they did, I just had no big desire to explore any of their other games.

It also, imo, doesn’t help that they hitched their cart because of that first big hit to a property whose cultural relevance was rapidly diminishing. I might have bit had they made games for different, more interesting properties (please lord, not superheroes!) They kept making games for a series whose TV show had passed into Lost levels of narrative nonsense and had lost its cultural significance.

Ugh, this is awful:



Between Telltale and the Dead Rising developer at Capcom Vancouver shutting down there were 400 jobs lost this week.

[quote=“Enidigm, post:94, topic:56234”]
Telltale was basically a mid-tier franchise tie-in brand maker that made it big through some alignment of the stars… probably too big. They hired “up” and got some amazing talent, but were still aiming at mid-tier franchise brands[/quote]

I don’t know if I agree with this. They got the rights to Game of Thrones at the height of its popularity. Batman will always be a hot property in gaming/comic/geek culture. From the outside looking in (with the benefit of hindsight), it does seem like Telltale’s projects were financially burdened with the costs of licensed IPs.

I think this raises a lot of questions if episodic content in the “Telltale style” is economically viable. I always bought these games early (so I didn’t lose track of them, to be honest) and played them after episode 5. But a lot of people are saying on Twitter/Reddit, they waited until after Episode 5 to buy them, or worse, waited until everything was out and it was on sale to buy them.

I’m discombobulated but i mean as much style. But honestly i think your examples make my point rather than refute it.

I mean, they should have thrown the kitchen sink at Game of Thrones, that was a huge miss. But the kind of game they made was supermarket pulpy and “games for all ages” and totally off key for the setting. But they chased Batman and Walking Dead instead of the hottest thing out there (Batman has perennial but limited maximum appeal).

What they should have done two years ago is make another GoT game but do it right, in a completely different style than before, more serious and adult and less cartoonish and colorful.

So, any chance these games eventually vanish from sale what with license term agreements and what have you? I have a few Telltale games in my backlog unplayed but maybe I should snap up the remaining few that I’m interested in, just in case.

Maybe there will be one positive from all this - companies will no longer do the nonsense episodic releasing. I always waited until whole season was out anyway and they lost money in the meantime.

Sad to see the studio go but it seems that they wanted to create too many products with too many disparate licenses, many of whom were mediocre. TWD, which was their showcase franchise, declined in quality on every single release. Wolf was a fantastic game and they did not come back to it. Some of their other games were good but I felt they never again hit the emotional heights they achieved in The Walking Dead.

As a massive fan of Clem, it is almost fitting that this is the end of her story. She is out there with AJ just trying to survive. As she always has been.

Wow, those numbers are insane. I guess the sales for GOG.com would be even lower, though I imagine customers there are more receptive of adventure games. Those figures for Borderlands and Guardians are mindboggling – I really liked them, though they were kind of formulaic.

This would be my take, too, in retrospect.

Thing about Telltale was that I really liked what they were doing in theory, narrative-driven games, released at reasonable prices, in popular genres I enjoyed. But I never bought any of them at full price, and those I did end up buying in humble bundles and whatnot, I pretty much never played.

In a similar vein, I wax rhapsodical about physical books, the feeling of reading words on paper, the physicality of them. But I haven’t read a physical book in 10 years, since the Kindle Keyboard came out.

I love these things, and want them to succeed, but I don’t myself contribute towards that.

Yeah - sad news but in a way I’m surprised that this didn’t happen sooner.

From the lack of proper PR push of their releases over the past 18 months or so it was getting pretty clear that they were hurting. I’m more shocked that they never attempted to change their formula this entire time.