Telltale Games closing shop

[Jacques d'Orleans]

One of the leaders once said that they struggle all the time, because they do games THEY like, not the games that sell well*. That they do games no big publishing house would make.

*Emphasis added by me. To be quite frank, if that statement is correct, that's quite a detachment from reality. Maybe they missed the memo that making games you like and making money isn't a contradiction.

So I think they pretty much fell victim to their vision. It's really sad.

Honestly, I always found their games good as YouTube/Twitch flavor of the month but nothing I would play myself. I don't know if their vision killed them or if they possibly did bite more off than they could chew or if they didn't know their target demographic.
Ubisoft San Francisco tweeted them that they have opportunities open, so maybe some of the laid off telltale guys find a new job soon.

 

[Chris Simon]

*Emphasis added by me. To be quite frank, if that statement is correct, that's quite a detachment from reality. Maybe they missed the memo that making games you like and making money isn't a contradiction.



Honestly, I always found their games good as YouTube/Twitch flavor of the month but nothing I would play myself. I don't know if their vision killed them or if they possibly did bite more off than they could chew or if they didn't know their target demographic.
Ubisoft San Francisco tweeted them that they have opportunities open, so maybe some of the laid off telltale guys find a new job soon.

That would be great. Because if I am to believe the tweets from various employees themselves (I have no reason not to), the whole "shutdown operation" was as much a surprise for them as it is for us. So yeah, management definitely failed there.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Playing a game where your actions influences the outcome. Where have I heard that before?

Awesome series of books.

 

[Evanitis]

Guess I'll never get to know how the tale of the Forrester family ends in The Game of Thrones. Shame.
Why weren't you all buying that title every weekend?

Though I guess I know. Telltale games were great until you tried to replay any chapter of any title to see the different outcomes.. only to realize that the outcomes aren't just the same, but the story loops back into it rather quickly. I never did mind that, as I just never replayed anything from them to keep the illusion intact. But many other players felt that they are only reading a well illustrated interactive audiobook. Maybe it feels to much like literature instead of gaming. :]

 

[Backer42]

Guess I'll never get to know how the tale of the Forrester family ends in The Game of Thrones. Shame.
Why weren't you all buying that title every weekend?

Oh, that's easy: I don't care for Game of Thrones.

Though I guess I know. Telltale games were great until you tried to replay

I'm not attached to these licensed franchises. And I still hold the old school prejudice, that licensed video games suck, because all the budget goes into the license and almost nothing into the game itself. "Buy this video game with whoever known from TV." - Well, I don't spend my evenings watching TV, because I spend them with innovative and original video game concepts instead.

Maybe that licensing business model wasn't really sound.

 

[xyphic]

For me the biggest problem with their games was that I'd rather watch a letsplay on Youtube than actually play them myself.

Interesting.

Telltale's games were never particularly difficult, so the experience of watching vs playing was actually quite similar (other than having to make choices yourself). I don't think you're alone here though, and that's really the big flaw in Telltale's game design -- you can get almost as much out of a let's play as you would from playing the game. They never cracked down on LPs so I think that a lot of people didn't buy their games because they'd already watched them being played for free.

For me, the biggest problem with their games didn't stem from their difficulty level or their lack of real consequence. It was that by the time the next episode rolled around after 1 or 2 months, I'd lost interest. This was okay for the early point-and-click adventures, but for their mostly narrative driven later games, I would play a couple of episodes and then something new would come along. That's what would drive me to watch an LP rather than playing the game.

Given their tie-in with Netflix it would have been nice to see them switch to a Netflix-like release schedule where all episodes drop at once. I think that would have encouraged people to buy and play them rather than watching them on YouTube.

 

[Evanitis]

Well, I don't spend my evenings watching TV, because I spend them with innovative and original video game concepts instead.

I kinda' do both. I can hardly compare the two. But from that perspective - I often find cool characters and situations and stories in many serieses, movies and novels. The series format is still having a great renaissance, barely known but very enjoyable titles get released every month.

On the other hand, most game developers release the same popular thing every year, while truly innovative titles remain unknown and far in between. And while gaming definitely provides a kind of enjoyment that other forms of entertainment does not, that industry very rarely manages to use a creative, enjoyable story as a backdrop. I miss that.

And I still hold the old school prejudice, that licensed video games suck

That's cool. I have buddies who refuse to try anything turn-based, others only ever touch games with photo-realistic graphics. People have their self-imposed limitations. Until there is a cross-section of the games we both prefer, it's all nice.

Though the "i don't play such games, they all suck" approach is only sufficient to add a +1 (or -1) to a discussion, it won't provoke a debate. Makes me wonder what's the point - we aren't doing a statistical analysis here.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

For some reason I never took interest in any of their games. I know from other forums that some of their work has quite the fanbase.
I think what turned me off most is episodical releases. Just call it "early access" like it should. And then the signs of QTEs and adventure on rails. I never bothered trying one out.

My guess is their large staff broke their financial neck. I guess it always does, but 250 employees seems unsually large staff for an indie.

 

[xyphic]

For some reason I never took interest in any of their games. I know from other forums that some of their work has quite the fanbase.
I think what turned me off most is episodical releases. Just call it "early access" like it should. And then the signs of QTEs and adventure on rails. I never bothered trying one out.

Telltale's games were certainly not what you could describe as "early access". They didn't release games piecemeal because they needed the cash from each installment, they did it because that was their gimmick: aligning how we consume games with how we consume TV. However, the long and often variable time between releases really hurt them. Imagine if you had a TV show you were watching weekly but didn't know if it'd arrive on Monday, Tuesday, etc. or even at all that week. Latterly they got better at delivering on time but at the cost of quality. It's for that reason that I think they should have abandoned the release schedule completely and just released complete games.

My guess is their large staff broke their financial neck. I guess it always does, but 250 employees seems unsually large staff for an indie.

They were an indie in the same sense that Frontier are an indie. They're similar sized companies, and I sincerely hope that Frontier take a look at what's happened with Telltale and don't make the same mistakes. Keeping a staff continuously in crunch mode to meet self-imposed deadlines and churn out content is what ultimately did for them.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Telltale's games were certainly not what you could describe as "early access". They didn't release games piecemeal because they needed the cash from each installment, they did it because that was their gimmick: aligning how we consume games with how we consume TV. However, the long and often variable time between releases really hurt them. Imagine if you had a TV show you were watching weekly but didn't know if it'd arrive on Monday, Tuesday, etc. or even at all that week. Latterly they got better at delivering on time but at the cost of quality. It's for that reason that I think they should have abandoned the release schedule completely and just released complete games.


They were an indie in the same sense that Frontier are an indie. They're similar sized companies, and I sincerely hope that Frontier take a look at what's happened with Telltale and don't make the same mistakes. Keeping a staff continuously in crunch mode to meet self-imposed deadlines and churn out content is what ultimately did for them.

Your buying their marketspeak? I don't. You pay in advance for later delivery. That isn't developed, yet. That's early access - disguised as "episodical storytelling". I mean I dont really mind if you buy it - I dont like it at all and thus no sale. Horizons is early access, too. Not too happy about it and I limit the concurrent EA-titles I play to but a few.

 

[Surefoot]

Keeping a staff continuously in crunch mode to meet self-imposed deadlines and churn out content is what ultimately did for them.

Also there's trying to expand too fast, too big, with huge expensive licences (that GoT licence sure didnt come cheap)... Seems like the suits in command had the dreams of becoming the next Ubi or EA, and i have seen that sadly too often with similar consequences.
Another ingredient i see in the mix is their management misunderstood the success of their Wolf Among Us series, it was actually because the setting was fresh and different from the mass, not because of intrinsic gameplay qualities. Having their name attached did nothing for the sales of their GoT series, which are far from spectacular, i would bet that one put them in the red. Adventure games are all about story telling and setting (*), that's how Beneath a Steel Sky, Monkey Island, etc. got successful and more recently Soma, Life Is Strange or so many indie pearls..

(*) Irony is that a company named "Tell Tale games" forgot that good adventure games are about telling good tales and maybe not about flashy licences..

 

[Evanitis]

You pay in advance for later delivery. That isn't developed, yet. That's early access - disguised as "episodical storytelling". I mean I dont really mind if you buy it - I dont like it at all and thus no sale.

I used a very ingenious solution to circumvent this: I only ever touched one of their games when it was properly released. I feel have eaten the cake, and kept it too. I didn't buy unfinished software, yet I still played their titles.

Just thought I mention this option in case you never thought of it. It works with other kinds of games too!

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I used a very ingenious solution to circumvent this: I only ever touched one of their games when it was properly released. I feel have eaten the cake, and kept it too. I didn't buy unfinished software, yet I still played their titles.

Just thought I mention this option in case you never thought of it. It works with other kinds of games too!

I do this all the time, yes. But - apart from the EA nature of chopping up content - it still didn't appeal much to me when it was available in full. And that is still due to the choppings: Because I think going chopchop on a game isn't good for the story-telling.

Leaving the crappy QTEs aside for the "gameplay". I mean I see people praise quantic Dreams all the time - I find their games utterly boring QTE fests.

 

[Chris Simon]

I do this all the time, yes. But - apart from the EA nature of chopping up content - it still didn't appeal much to me when it was available in full. And that is still due to the choppings: Because I think going chopchop on a game isn't good for the story-telling.

Leaving the crappy QTEs aside for the "gameplay". I mean I see people praise quantic Dreams all the time - I find their games utterly boring QTE fests.

They are interactive stories. Not proper games in the right sense of the word.
Still I do see an appeal. Or better said, I do see why certain kinds of players would like them and enjoy them.

There are people who play games for the challenging gameplay and there are those who play them for the story and consider the gameplay just a way to get to the next bit of the story. So just as there are games that are "purely gameplay" (for example the pixelart rogue-like platformers, that are incredibly frustrating for a casual gamer), there are also "purely story" games.
Both games and players can be inclining towards one extreme or the other, or be anywhere in between. There's nothing wrong with that.

But the problem with the pure story games without gameplay is, like some people before said, that there is no difference between playing them and watching somebody else play them.

 

[knowles2]

Telltale has let go the majority of their employees and cutting to a 25 strong skelton crew. Stranger Things and The Wolf Among Us 2 are cancelled.

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/3270...ead_developer_Telltale_Games_closing_down.php

https://www.usgamer.net/articles/report-telltale-games-shutting-down-the-wolf-among-us-2-and-stranger-things-canceled

The largely click and point games always seem to do better with critics than with gamers, with hardly anyone admitting to playing them, let alone buying them. I'm not surprise they are closing down. They seem to be rather inefficient, 250 people seem like a lot of people to make the kind of games they made.

A real shame, perhaps they will be brought by someone who willing to run the operation at break even or even at a loss for promoting their games an creating bigger in universe stories than is possible with their main game. Netflix perhap.


An acquisition target for Frontier, who management seem to be able to run a pretty lean operation, I don't believe many other studios would have produce jurassic park evolution on just a 10 million pound budget. Given they are running a skeleton operations one suspect they are trying to sale or get investment from someone.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

The largely click and point games always seem to do better with critics than with gamers, with hardly anyone admitting to playing them, let alone buying them. I'm not surprise they are closing down. They seem to be rather inefficient, 250 people seem like a lot of people to make the kind of games they made.

A real shame, perhaps they will be brought by someone who willing to run the operation at break even or even at a loss for promoting their games an creating bigger in universe stories than is possible with their main game. Netflix perhap.


An acquisition target for Frontier, who management seem to be able to run a pretty lean operation, I don't believe many other studios would have produce jurassic park evolution on just a 10 million pound budget. Given they are running a skeleton operations one suspect they are trying to sale or get investment from someone.

What's there to buy? Unique IPs? No, the staff will distribute in the winds. Some might seed new studios and maybe start their own ideas. Like so often.

 

[Chris Simon]

If political themes were allowed, I'd also point out that their questionable SJW politics of hiring staff of the right gender rather than the right skillset might have had something to do with the falling quality of their titles, but I won't.

:x

 

[Backer42]

The largely click and point games always seem to do better with critics than with gamers, with hardly anyone admitting to playing them, let alone buying them. I'm not surprise they are closing down.

Many "critics" don't play video games at all, so it is not surprising, that "almost non-games" with well-known TV licenses work well with those. It's not a new phenomenon either.

Having a Metacritic score gets you a nice bonus, but to make a profit you actualy need to sell something to gamers.