What is up next for Telltale games?

They also publish 7 Days to Die for the developer Fun Pimps, who hopes to continue to distribute and support it despite the loss of their partner. No updates since 9/22.
https://7daystodie.com/telltale-layoffs/

Drawing comparisons to the recent Rockstar controversy, Buck refuted co-founder Dan Houser’s comments that it was only a small team of senior writers “who work very hard purely because they’re passionate about a project”.

“As a person who has been on that ‘small team’ of lead writers and narrative designers re-doing things, let me tell you that can be catastrophic for the rest of the team,” said Buck. “We often, at Telltale, after executive reviews, had to do 90 per cent rewrites of the game.”

She added that rewriting anywhere between 60 and 90 per cent of a game was common occurrence, sometimes days before being sent off for certification, creating a whole host of problems for the downstream teams.

“Telltale Games often got knocked for being very buggy and having a lot of frame skips,” said Buck. “Yes, we had some of those, but a lot of the time what people thought were frame skips or buggy parts of our engine, were actually scenes that had gotten redone so last minute, that there was no time to smooth out the cinematography or the animation… what you were seeing was not a product of a buggy engine, but buggy management system.”

So what went wrong? Buck believes that one of the biggest problems was a “fundamental misunderstanding of who our audience was” among most, though not all, of the executive leadership.

Both Minecraft: Story Mode, and Guardians of the Galaxy were games where this misunderstanding were apparent, said Buck. The first two episodes of Minecraft: Story Mode were originally M-rated, and had to be rewritten; in this case, Buck said, it was fortunate as it was clearly misaligned with the younger target demographic of Minecraft.

With Guardians of the Galaxy, however, it was almost the exact opposite. Much like the source material, which the creative team studied extensively in order to try and capture the tone and feel of the universe, the original draft of the game was funnier and more “goofy”, but that was all stripped out to lean into a darker, grittier feel, that was tonally off from the franchise.

“Our executive team insisted that what was popular about Guardians of the Galaxy, was darkness and violence, and sadness,” said Buck. “And that people did not associate humour with that brand… So we redid the first two episodes to be less funny and more dark and more violent and more sad, and that’s the game that shipped. And one of the biggest comments in editorial, was that it felt very off-tone for Guardians of the Galaxy and wasn’t very funny. And we were like ‘we know’.”

Whoa, an M-rated Minecraft game? What would that even look like? Wait - don’t answer that, I don’t think I want to know.

It was probably just foul language and f bombs.

Is that all it takes to get an M rating these days? Is it like an R rated movie basically?

M for a game is a lot easier than an R for a movie. IIRC, PG-13 movies are even allowed one “fuck” in the dialogue.

Edit: I guess so, but it has to be “non-sexual.”

Those are some pretty dumb executives.

People like Guardians of the Galaxy for its violence and sadness? WTF? Did Telltale have Zack Snyder on their board?

I liked the Guardians of the Galaxy game, I think the whole “darkness and violence, and sadness” thing is a bit overstated. It’s no more of that than you saw in the movies, in my opinion.

Skybound executive and Telltale director answered questions on Reddit about the plans to continue Walking Dead Final Season.

They say the whole staff will be ex-TTers unless they really can’t fill a role from that group.

Seriously. I’m guessing it wasn’t the same group of executives who brought The Walking Dead to fruition at Telltale or we would have had a game full of Negan and dumpsters.

I can kinda understand the sad part of GotG (all of the characters have sad backstories.) But anyone who thought an M-rated Minecraft game would fly with Microsoft was completely out of touch.

Fantastic video from SuperBunnyHop on Telltale’s demise.

Is a good video, even touch hot-topics like overworking and leaks.

I can’t redownload the installers for my purchased Telltale (monkey island, bone, 3 seasons of sam & max, homestar runner, wallace & gromit, back to the future) games on their website even though I can still sign into my Telltale account. Anyone know of any options?

others i purchased through gog/steam are still accessible.

I did not think of that, I’ve got a few games I bought directly from Telltale, I’ll take a look.

Looks like the CDN (content distribution network) servers work again for me after getting ‘no access’ type XML errors upon previous tries. I will redownload what I can.

Get your downloads while you can. Pirates once again have the last laugh.

OK, I was able to download the games I had bought from Telltale. Hope they don’t need to do a server check or something when I want to play them.