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.
I played Poker Night at the Inventory, because I wanted to play poker, and thought it might be funny, and it was awfully slow and stilted and really not much fun at all either as a poker game or as some kind of story.
As an advertising tool, their games were ok.
For me, talking about Telltale’s engine problems isn’t really as much “dancing on their grave” as it is “duh, everyone knew it, even all of the people at the company, but their hands were tied by management in doing anything about it”.
To me, blaming the tech alone misses the forest for the trees. One one is pretending otherwise and it’s not a surprise to anyone who worked on or played the games. But it was what it was because the management seemed to force them to expand wildly beyond their means, never scheduled any necessary time to regroup, change tech, or whatever they needed to do to get things out of control.
Tech issues are rarely a problem purely stemming from the people who built or maintained that tech. There’s usually a much more interesting story to tell about why it got into that state than simply “they built bad tech”. And that’s the story I hope comes out with more time, as a cautionary tale to management at other companies that they need to put resources into people and prioritizing the fundamentals instead of just squeezing them for all they’re worth.
Just brutal…
To my surprise this has indeed been released:
https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/batman-the-enemy-within-switch
Huh, sounded like they were staying on to work on the Netflix version of Minecraft, did they complete that or did that deal fall through?
Oh dear. Somehow I missed this whole saga.
Too bad for the employees, but it’s not that surprising. They made weird, buggy games that usually looked inviting, but fell down in execution somehow.
At least maybe now their game’s characters, with their flat, expressionless faces and jerky bodies, will no longer haunt my dreams.
Looks like Telltale’s closure is having repercussions beyond the studio itself - I had forgotten that they were publishing other studios’ games, and now Stranded Deep on PS4 and Xbox One has been delayed indefinitely.