Steam doesn’t tell us raw sales numbers, so we’ll never have super-accurate data. But as Armando and Paul point out, concurrent players provide us with sampling data and trend lines that we can use to extrapolate some pretty general estimates on…especially when companies do tell us sales figures for games, which happens somewhat regularly, for instance in quarterly/yearly reports for some game companies, in sales diligence documentation, or even bankruptcy proceedings. And we can then use those real numbers with concurrent player numbers to make some horseshoes and hand grenades estimates of total sales…especially for similar games released in similar time periods.
I mean, I think we’re perfectly able to extrapolate information from the combination of those numbers and the fact that the studio just shuttered. Their games sold less, got played less, and for unfathomable reasons, they continued hiring up during most of that downward spiral.
Well, I think I just gave you the fathomable reason. They were getting handed big money because their games were marketing exercises as much as they were new stories and “games”.
“Thinks that runaway success is possible as a persistent state, rather than lightning-in-a-bottle fluke success” appears to be, sadly, a very common cause of failure for games companies.
Not to digress too much, but it seems like the ability to not over-extend when they’re given a license to print money, is one of the core competencies of some of the long-lived companies, like, say, Nintendo.
Except reports/internal murmurings linked above that I am now way too lazy to scroll up and find claim that basically no game they released since TWD S2 was profitable. The regular cash infusions from–sure, let’s call 'em–“marketing partners” were certainly nonzero amounts that could fund some game development, but if they apparently weren’t enough all on their own to finance the games in question, and then especially if those games continued to sell more and more abysmally so that the distance between “amount paid by our marketing partner” and “amount we spent creating that game” continues to grow and you become more and more dependent on just one of these titles breaking out. . .
I mean, look, I get it. If times are tough and getting worse, turning away “free money” seems like a really shitty thing to do. But if that money winds up forcing you to make moves that put you deeper in the hole, it’s not really the blessing that it seems like.
I think of the nonprofit I work for. We got stuck on a grant for 3 years that did not, it turned out, pay more than about a third of our per-participant costs, once overhead was factored in (and which the grant specifically refused to cover, but it didn’t even fully cover non-overhead costs). Our development person swore to us she’d find matching funds, and that the participant projects financed by the grant money would enable us to forge longer-term relationships with regional partners, but those matching funds and partners never really materialized, so at the end of the three years, that huge, nearly 7-figure grant wound up costing us an extraordinary amount of money.
This is an excellent observation. Given the talent level at Telltale, and the fact that a market exists for casual/HOG/puzzle type games, you would think the studio could have cranked out some decent selling games with engrossing stories in the genre either through it’s license deals or better yet with it’s own brand new IPs and used those as an income stream to keep the lights on between major licenses.
It seems like the reliance on obtaining major licenses for nearly every game was a big flaw in the business plan. They needed more of their own stuff along the lines of Poker Night at the Inventory to keep the place afloat.
Optimism runs strong through game development, especially if the people working there are willing to put in countless hours to create the games. Usually they don’t have good people looking at the bottom line.
Anyway, they kept finding money until they didn’t. Not the first nor the last.
Except, AFAICT, the problem wasn’t that the licenses dried: they were still working on Batman, and The Walking Dead right to the end. The problem was that the projects they DID have were mismanaged to the point where they were losing money on them.
In smaller studios like that, the contract work is what keeps you afloat, until you make enough of a nest egg to invest in your own independent work. And if that independent work bombs, well, you spend another couple of years doing contracts to keep the lights on until you have the cash to sink into building another new IP.
It’s possible to be an adver-games company and to survive long term, or at least until the contracts dry up. What isn’t really possible is to do that with 350 people.
Your post amuses me, mainly because your average HOG had more player interaction than most Telltale games, at least since The Walking Dead. And I am a die-hard fan of Telltale’s stuff!
Still I do think it would have been cool to see what original content Telltale could have created. They definitely had some talented writers at one time.
I didn’t say they dried up, just that mostly relying on big license partnerships was the flaw. Working on TWD as a small studio is great. Working on TWD, Minecraft, Batman and Stranger Things all at the same time means you can’t be a small studio anymore, you need multiple teams working on multiple “big” projects tied to licensing from multiple partners, and that was obviously too much for Telltale to handle, especially when those big games with big teams were not selling well on the back end. Maybe if they’d sprinkled some small team, decent profit casual games into the mix between big license projects they would have had a more reliable income stream to draw on when things got tight. They certainly had the talent level and the background to pull off projects like that.
But, what is done is done. I’m sad to see Telltale close, and I hope that somewhere there are publishers/developers who see the merit in the kind of game experience Telltale was creating, and that those companies will hire the Telltale employees to perhaps continue making similar games. I feel like, if it was well-managed with realistic expectations and a small team, you could make Telltale-style games successfully for a long time to come. Maybe cut the episodic thing and just release complete games at a $25 price point to appeal to both casual gamers and fans of whatever license you’ve partnered with.
This is a great observation. And obviously, the up-front costs of those licenses carry with it sales thresholds just to even get in the ballpark of maybe breaking even.
And what should be frustrating for Telltale fans: people left Telltale and made games like Firewatch and Oxenfree. There was clearly talent within that studio to develop original IP. They could still develop a few big licensed games…but they could’ve scaled back and massaged original IP with different tools and a different look and perhaps found something really successful.
I don’t find that frustrating, quite the opposite. In fact, I’d say that if any good came out of Telltale’s path to where it ended up, it’s that many fruit bearing seeds were dropped along the way. Obviously my preference would have been that Telltale survived to keep givin us games, what what are ya gonna do.
As just gamers/consumers it is awesome. But the fact that talent leaks of that stature took place because Telltale wasn’t agile enough to take advantage – and the possibility that if they had, they might still be making games instead of not – ought to be a little frustrating. A vision of Telltale that allows something like Firewatch to be developed in-house and spurs even more original development with the talented writers and artists there, is tantalizing.
The thing is, people were making this observation plenty with YouTube, where it’s trivial to find stitched-together full-playthrough videos with no commentary and all different choices and endings for pretty much every Telltale game. The argument I kept hearing back then was “it’s not the same as playing it yourself!” I guess the market disagreed.
They actually integrated some tools into some of the more recent games (like Batman) that allowed streamers to hand over some control to viewers, or maybe it allowed for voting? I never tried it, not a streamer myself.
I am not sure I accept that Twitch or YouTube is a major cause of Telltale’s downfall. LiS sold 3,000,000 copies. If you make a compelling product people will buy it.
Yep. The Youtube argument is a bad one. Firewatch sold over a million copies. Gone Home got close. LiS was a runaway hit.
Hell, I hate the entire sub-sub-genre, but the success of FNAF should be enough to fully set the whole “Youtube and Twitch kill linear adventure game sales” argument to rest.
