So, they were trying to do another financing round - and, at some point, the one remaining party pulled out.
“The company was working diligently to close a round of financing,” he told Variety . “Unfortunately, when the last potential financial backer abruptly pulled out, we were left in a position where we had no choice but to stop production. Sadly, everyone was so focused on doing what was required to keep the company going that when the last potential partner backed out, there were no other options.”
While Connors declined to note what company specifically backed out, several sources say it was possibly Lionsgate.
Lionsgate last week notified the board that it had decided to stop funding Telltale so it could refocus on its core business. And Lionsgate was cited, one employee said, during the meeting Friday morning as one of several things that led to the decision to layoff the company’s staff.
Lionsgate invested a reported $40 million in Telltale back in February 2015 with the idea of working on a live-action and interactive project with the company called a “super show.” But the idea never took hold.
I remember when Troika guys knew they were about to close due to Vampire failing, they still did it at a time when they knew they could afford to pay people severance.
I guess Teltalle management were really confident they could get the money until the last moment, and when it fell through, they had no more money for it.
The most well-received title from the studio, The Walking Dead’ s first season, didn’t have a huge launch back in 2012 with a peak of 6.6k concurrent players on Steam; however, it did eventually double that with 12k concurrent players once given away for free on the Humble Store last year.
Telltale’s most lucrative launch was Season 2 of TWD , which became the studio’s most played title ever, peaking at 18k concurrent players back in 2014. And that same year, The Wolf Among Us came in a close second, also contributing to the success of the studio with a peak of another 14k concurrent players.
Unfortunately, mirroring the declining viewership for AMC’s TV show, Telltale’s decline also started back in 2014 after Season 2 of The Walking Dead . The third season, A New Frontier , only peaked at 4.9k players last year. And this year’s Final Season was one of the studio’s worst launches ever with a disappointing peak of only 2k concurrent players.
2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series is a prime example of the studio’s failing business plan. Despite being one of the most successful movies at the box office bringing in over a billion dollars for Disney and Marvel, Telltale’s take on the lovable superhero space squad didn’t help the struggling dev when it peaked at a shockingly low 627 concurrent players on Steam last year.
Telltale’s attempt at comic book rival DC’s Batman didn’t do much better with both Season 1 and Season 2 of the Dark Knight’s adventures only bringing in a couple thousand players at their peaks.
And even Minecraft , one of the most successful video games of all time, didn’t translate into sales for Telltale. Season 1 of Minecraft: Story Mode peaked with only 3.6k players and Season 2 did just as poorly as GotG with a peak of only 820 players last year.
I mean, if I’m a games industry analyst, I can read between the lines here for Telltale.
“Hey kids! You wanna play a videogame about the Avengers???”
“YEAH!!!”
“Great! Now, You’re not going to actually beat guys up. Or fly cool airplanes. Or drive cool cars. Or even really engage in any action. You’re just going to make some story choices.”
Ditto for Minecraft.
Not only were all their titles related to specific, expensive licenses, but in so many cases they failed to capture what people might be interested in for a videogame. In a few cases – like TWD, Wolf, and even Game Of Thrones – there’s a good match in the narrative heavy, choice heavy gameplay that Telltale was trying to do.
Unfortunately, they never really executed what they were trying to do. I enthusiastically fell in love with TWD early on, but realized that by the end, so many of the choices I’d made weren’t really choices at all. Same with Wolf. And GoT was the big swing and miss. The choices weren’t super impactful, and the sanitized story was goop. A bigger, more branching story with multiple choices that really matter version of GoT might’ve made it worthwhile.
Financing rounds and fiscal years that start in October are also why September is such a nervous time in the world of tech startups, he said nervously glancing at the calendar…
I wonder how that would even work? The handful of people still employed are the team working to finish the Minecraft port for Netflix. All the TWD people were let go. I suppose they could try to lure some of the TWD team back with promises of steady paychecks for awhile and some severance/bonus money when it was all said and done, but would anyone take that offer after having been treated the way they were? And would it even be wise to do so, given that they other 200 former employees are all out there snatching up any available industry jobs while you’re living on borrowed time working for a company that is already dead?
Hiring new people would be pretty difficult, as everyone knows what happened and nobody is going to take a job they know will only last a short while and that they could lose without warning or severance should there be another funding issue. I guess if you were desperate for experience in the industry maybe…
Makes absolutely no sense to me. But Paul_Cze seems to hold those numbers in great esteem.
For episodic Telltale games, there is absolutely no incentive to all play it continuously or concurrently.
If you bought the season pass, you will play a few hours between when 1 episode released and the next.
You don’t need to play any longer than that and you certainly don’t need to play it as soon as it drops to stay ahead of the curve or any such nonsense. A few might replay and try different decisions. But I’d guess that’s not even the majority.
If you were waiting for all episodes to release, you will play the episodes at some point after the full season releases. But, by then, you are probably not waiting on tenterhooks to play it right as it drops.
I really don’t see what the concurrent numbers are supposed to mean in that context. They mean less than for most games.
I would take the concurrent numbers more as a general trendline rather than a specific value.
Since Steam locked down most of the tools that services like SteamSpy used to (rather accurately) guess at sale numbers, it’s way harder for us to pinpoint absolute values. But in general, you can assume that a lot of people are going to play a game on launch. Even episodic stuff like Telltale games are gonna have a contingent of megafans who consume each release day and date. Thus, in general, your peak concurrent tends to hit around launch, or occasionally after a blip event like a free weekend or a Humble bundle.
If the number of people who ping up that peak concurrent has dropped to 10% of what it was at your company’s high point, all the “Well sure but I only play when they’re all done / it’s not multiplayer so it’s okay” handwaving in the world doesn’t really change the fact that way fewer people seem to be buying and playing your releases.
Really? You have a 2-3 hours episode to play before the next episode releases 4-6 weeks later. We certainly never rushed to play a new one. And I can’t really see any incentive to do so. It’s more of a game you play when you need a filler game in between other sessions.
I’m not handwaving anything away. The company failed and obviously didn’t sell enough games (or spent too much on the licenses). But concurrent numbers seem particularly meaningless in this context.
Yes, obviously. But the trend seems pretty clear. Games that had higher concurrent players at launch are the ones that sold. The ones that had very few sold generally very poorly.
…I see Armando already elaborated. Thanks Armando!
Handing off assets, scripts, and tools to a totally new team to finish a game is a fool’s errand. This happened to a project I was on years ago (Ruin/Warrior’s Lair for PS3/Vita). Sony suddenly lost a ton of money, and our partner, Sony San Diego, killed the project four or five months from completion to save money. But what they said was that they were going to finish it internally. (Can’t blame them for trying to save their internal team instead of some external second party studio.)
But the moment we saw that, we knew they would never get anywhere with it. Our tools and engine were built in-house. Very few people at Sony SD knew anything about the design of the game, and no one knew it in depth. We heard through the grapevine later that the game was shelved mere weeks after they took it away from us. I think they announced that the game was actually dead a year later. This was a game they took preorders for, btw, so it’s maybe not as bad as a game that’s already launched an episode, but it’s close.
Anyway, I assumed the announcement from Telltale about the Final Season meant that financial partners were helping to pay the original team to finish it. But former Telltale and Telltale-adjacent folks seem to think this means development partners will try to take it over. That’s what we call both a shitty and a stupid move.
Yeah if I had to guess, they’d hire them back on a contract basis, that seems easiest. Seems weird, but since these folks are left without severance and potential loss of insurance at the end of the month, I imagine at least some would go for it.
Again, it’s the best data we can easily access, and it obviously follows a trend. 4 years ago 20k people hopped on to play the latest Telltale title right away, 4 months ago it was 800. That’s. . . not great, no matter how unusual the release structure of these games might be. Obviously hard numbers straight from Telltale’s CFO would be more accurate/illuminating, but barring that, concurrents are a decent comparison value.
Concurrent users don’t mean much when compared to other genres, or whatever, but comparing one Telltale game to another, it probably gives a more or less accurate sense of relative popularity. A more popular game will tend to have more concurrent users than a less popular one.
I don’t think it’s any more useful than the steamspy ownership numbers MrTibbs posted above, but they paint about the same picture.
I think it’s always dangerous to try to extrapolate real data from numbers like those. They really don’t mean that much IMO. The only thing that you should rely on is actual sales numbers, which obviously no one can see nowadays, so we don’t know shit.
Also, this company and its games are clearly used as marketing tools as much as they are for selling games. That big influx of Lionsgate money tells you that.
