Author Topic: RIP Telltale Games (probably)  (Read 4141 times)

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Tasty

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RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« on: September 21, 2018, 03:52:23 PM »
First it was 25% of employees (Polygon lol), then it was everyone but 25 employees (down from 250), now it's "25 for now but they're on their way out too."

Sucks, they were one of the most consistent publishers of all time.

https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/1043223025733255168

https://twitter.com/joeparlock/status/1043223544639959040

https://twitter.com/LawofTD/status/1043223826941669376

Himu

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #1 on: September 21, 2018, 04:00:07 PM »
Going from TWD to this? How?
IYKYK

Tasty

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #2 on: September 21, 2018, 04:01:29 PM »
There must be some kind of massive mismanagement happening.

Although I'm not sure they needed 250 employees either, but I also don't know all the projects they were attempting to work on at the same time. However many, it was obviously too much.

Himu

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #3 on: September 21, 2018, 04:10:54 PM »
250 employees is some 1990’s squaresoft shit. That for light adventure games?
IYKYK

mormapope

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #4 on: September 21, 2018, 04:13:43 PM »
I feel they were a very talented studio that kept making the same game over and over. I love The Walking Dead season 1, and Wolf Among us Season 1. Everything else is very meh to me, just didn't have interest.

OH!

mormapope

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #5 on: September 21, 2018, 04:16:37 PM »
250 employees is some 1990’s squaresoft shit. That for light adventure games?

Ubisoft games from last gen had about 900 to 1000 people assigned to a project, Assassins Creed 3 if I recall correctly. To my knowledge, huge teams of people that get contracted to work on a single studio project has not gone away.


OH!

Himu

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #6 on: September 21, 2018, 04:18:54 PM »
Sure but the scope AC and a TT game are way different. You could make TWD with 50 people.
IYKYK

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #7 on: September 21, 2018, 04:18:58 PM »
Unfortunate. I liked their stuff. I liked story based games. I'm certain some other studio(s) will pick up the banner for this style of game.

They weren't perfect of course. No game is but I like games that focus on story.

Walking Dead Season 1 was a classic.
Tales from the Borderlands is an under-rated funny gem.
The Wolf Among Us was also very good.

I have a feeling they were mismanaged and spent too much money chasing certain properties like the Game of Thrones game or Batman.

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #8 on: September 21, 2018, 04:19:56 PM »
I feel they were a very talented studio that kept making the same game over and over.

Not saying I necessarily disagree but I think that puts them right in line with 99% of game devs.

Tasty

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #9 on: September 21, 2018, 04:20:58 PM »
Sure but the scope AC and a TT game are way different. You could make TWD with 50 people.

They might have been working on 5 or 6 projects, hard to tell right now.

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #10 on: September 21, 2018, 04:22:39 PM »
Telltale was garbage, their games are buggy messes with game breaking bugs that they never addressed (like the save game bug from twd s1)

Sure they scratched some itch but youre better off rewatching Back to the Future then playing their version

kingv

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #11 on: September 21, 2018, 04:25:33 PM »
Sure but the scope AC and a TT game are way different. You could make TWD with 50 people.

They released like 3 or 4 games per year.

I think they were oversaturated as much as anything else.... but considering how simple the games were, even 75 on a game seems like a lot.

mormapope

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #12 on: September 21, 2018, 04:28:33 PM »
I feel they were a very talented studio that kept making the same game over and over.

Not saying I necessarily disagree but I think that puts them right in line with 99% of game devs.

I'd say their games were destined to not age or grow like other games did. Linear, episodic, story based games didn't really catch on.



OH!

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #13 on: September 21, 2018, 04:42:40 PM »
I'd say their games were destined to not age or grow like other games did. Linear, episodic, story based games didn't really catch on.

Not sure about age or grow. For me that is a very subjective thing. I'm fine with a good story game that plays great on one playthrough. I think that style of game is for some people and not for other people. It's definitely a niche thing, but I'm certainly part of that niche and games like the Telltale games and Life is Strange games definitely had fanbases.

I can only speak for myself and say that I enjoy this style of game. And more than the museum version of this style of game like Gone Home, FireWatch, etc.  Whether the market supports it going forward, we will see although I'm not tied to the idea of episodic itself. I'm tied to the idea of story focused games. They could have released the telltale stuff as one complete season/game at a time, and I would have been fine with that also.

People dis the telltale stuff as merely visual novels but that isn't a diss to me. They were visual novels. But I like visual novels.


Himu

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #14 on: September 21, 2018, 04:45:52 PM »
Why are VNs a bad thing? They have their place.
IYKYK

Tasty

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #15 on: September 21, 2018, 04:51:51 PM »
I expected Telltale to truck along for at least 5-10 more years, if not 15-20. They seemed to have their audience on lock and enjoyed quite a bit of success (both financial and critical.)

Hindsight is 20/20 so I don't begrudge the leaders for trying to expand so aggressively, but even though "make your studio as big as it can be" might be (skewed) conventional wisdom, companies are rarely one-size-fits-all.

Tasty

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #16 on: September 21, 2018, 04:53:16 PM »
It's like if Lego went bankrupt a month after The Lego Movie released.

Might just raise a few questions on who's doing what at the top.

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #17 on: September 21, 2018, 04:57:19 PM »
I think the episodic model put a real strain on the company. I imagine that must have felt like constant crunch as you try to put out episode after episode to complete a season.

I think the content you pick also becomes very important. If the subject matter of a particular topic doesn't interest you then even if you like the genre, that particular game won't interest you.

Like I had zero interest in a minecraft story game. I'm sure its actually probably a fine game and I'll probably play it one day, but I was nope on that one and some of the others like the Batman game.

Tasty

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #18 on: September 21, 2018, 05:00:20 PM »
I think if you orient your development around it, Episodic can actually be sort of freeing, since you're reusing so much between releases.

I'm not a Telltale dev though so I don't know. It seemed like they were making it work for them, and it *does* guarantee some kind of consistent/scheduled income.

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #19 on: September 21, 2018, 05:04:37 PM »
I'm not a Telltale dev though so I don't know. It seemed like they were making it work for them, and it *does* guarantee some kind of consistent/scheduled income.

I wonder though if it would be better to put all your focus and marketing on one thing instead of having to drum it up all every few months to keep people in the loop. The content could still be episodic in how its played but its more like the netflix model of give you all the episodes at once.

kingv

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #20 on: September 21, 2018, 05:04:53 PM »
I’m wondering how much they split their fan base as well. I can play maybe one of these types of games per year, and it’s a nice change of pace for a few hours a month for a few months.

But telltale just seems like they were bombarding the market with them and eventually I just decided I couldn’t fuck with them all, even if I liked the underlying properties on at least half of them.

I think that is evident in the press coverage of each one too... it didn’t really seem like Guardians of the Galaxy made much noise on release or Batman season 2. If they had like 1 game per year, it seems more sustainable.

The “we develop six games at once” model also made it difficult to improve anything. Clearly different teams are on each game, and how do they develop the engine from game to game? I think if they just put all their effort into one game at a time, learned from it, and made some tweaks to the engine and gameplay each time, it could maybe have worked for longer.


That said, their monkey island game is underrated. I loved jumping back into monkey island when it came out.

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #21 on: September 21, 2018, 05:12:37 PM »


Tales from the borderlands had amazing intros for their episodes.


Play this game. I know some people in their heads were turned off by the association with borderlands style humour but this game rocks imo.

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #22 on: September 21, 2018, 05:21:25 PM »
Oxenfree was cool even though it got a bit samey and I never finished it

Nintex

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #23 on: September 21, 2018, 07:00:23 PM »
I always felt like they wanted to milk and cash their formula dry and then sell the joint to EA, Ubisoft or whoever was willing to put up the cash.

Management must've been really really bad if Microsoft didn't pick them up.  :doge
🤴

thisismyusername

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #24 on: September 21, 2018, 07:35:59 PM »



Going from TWD to this? How?

Making the same game over and over and over. Doing a Mass Effect 3 level of screw-up (YOUR CHOICES MATTER! Narrator: Your choices didn't matter) and shit engine (eating game saves, performance on the Velveta ports of the Walking Dead having it STUTTER and eat lines...).

It sucks they may not finish "THE LAST SEASON OF THE WALKING DEAD! (lol we'll keep milking this with AJ!)" but whatever. S to spit on their grave, and I say that as someone that enjoyed the Walking Dead series.



You can tell by how bundled the Walking Dead Season 1 was "successful" and they blew-up into licensing IP's (for nothing, given the dismal sales post TWD Season 2). The above reasons alone are why after the Walking Dead season 2, most people couldn't care.

Rufus

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #25 on: September 21, 2018, 07:46:13 PM »
Grew too fast and took on took on too many projects.

Their rickety tech held them back too, but the only recently ousted CEO (?) was married to it because he had a hand in creating it.

thisismyusername

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #26 on: September 21, 2018, 07:50:09 PM »
https://twitter.com/LawofTD/status/1043278296396357633

Welp. Glad I didn't pay for the Last Season. :lol People will be rightly pissed if the last 3 episodes aren't released and/or this isn't a proper conclusion.

What a mess.

Just to add to the "your choices (don't) matter!"

spoiler (click to show/hide)
[close]

Spoilered just in case anyone gives a damn.

But here's a link for the first season of the Walking Dead. Note how many are nearly the same damn thing: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/the-walking-dead-graph-by-gamesbeat.jpg

That's the same shit with the choices continuing in later seasons.

spoiler (click to show/hide)
Choose Jane over Kenny? LOL SHE COMMITS SUICIDE TO GET HER OUT OF THE PICTURE, FUCK YOU.
[close]

mormapope

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #27 on: September 21, 2018, 07:53:54 PM »
I got the last season because you got the entire Wapking Dead collection for free!  >:(

OH!

Rufus

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #28 on: September 21, 2018, 07:55:06 PM »
...Maybe I should download those Sam&Max games while I still can.

Huh, didn't know I owned Back to the Future, too. :doge

kingv

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #29 on: September 21, 2018, 08:31:48 PM »
I kind of wish they had stuck to their other games that were basically traditional adventure games as well.

While I think a lot of them were not as good as the originals, they were solid enough for a genre that hasn’t received a ton of entries.

eleuin

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #30 on: September 21, 2018, 08:38:33 PM »
every one of their games was on sale  ~3 weeks after release, curious how many people actually bought them for full price

Yeti

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #31 on: September 21, 2018, 09:11:11 PM »
I don't think I've ever played a Telltale game. I was kind of interested in trying out Guardians of the Galaxy and Batman. Maybe now I'll just wait for the fire sale.  :doge
WDW

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #32 on: September 21, 2018, 09:11:13 PM »
I liked the Monkey Island series they did, even though it wasn't as good as the original games. That's about it.
dog

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #33 on: September 21, 2018, 09:46:53 PM »
I kind of wish they had stuck to their other games that were basically traditional adventure games as well.

While I think a lot of them were not as good as the originals, they were solid enough for a genre that hasn’t received a ton of entries.

I'm fine with those franchises making a return at some point but at the time when they started these games, they were pretty much in the same position they are in now. They had miked Sam & Max, & Curse of Monkey Island reboot games to death.

Himu

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #34 on: September 21, 2018, 10:21:55 PM »
I liked the Monkey Island series they did, even though it wasn't as good as the original games. That's about it.

It feels like their pre TWD stuff like Sam and Max and Monkey Island games have been entirely forgotten.
IYKYK

Positive Touch

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #35 on: September 21, 2018, 11:25:01 PM »
play tales from the borderlands you choads
pcp

eleuin

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thisismyusername

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #37 on: September 22, 2018, 12:05:14 AM »
https://twitter.com/Binkysaur/status/1

Surprise, Surprise. Game industry still sucks to work for. Quelle Surprise!

Tasty

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #38 on: September 22, 2018, 02:50:19 AM »
LMFAO TIMU that GIF literally killed me

HardcoreRetro

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #39 on: September 22, 2018, 11:37:49 AM »
Oh man, someone call the Ghostbusters.

benjipwns

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #40 on: September 23, 2018, 02:06:40 AM »
Quote

TWD Season Two is their real sales peak probably.

Season One was $1, $1 and FREE during three different Humble bundles/promotions in 2016-17.

The Wolf Among Us is pretty surprising. That must be TWD leakage, because Fables probably isn't anywhere near that popular. Tales From The Borderlands did pretty well too.

Interesting that they put out three games in 2016 that look like they have around 250K+ Steam owners each and before 2018 ends they no longer exist.

benjipwns

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #41 on: September 23, 2018, 02:17:54 AM »
I want to say they had a bunch more licenses than games they had put out or fully announced too. I seem to remember a big list (that included Fables, The Walking Dead, etc.) in the wake of Back To The Future silly hype and then more after The Walking Dead did so well. I'll assume a lot of them were comic related since Batman and Guardians have since come out.

Also feel like when I've looked at Wikipedia pages for things there were lots of "Telltale Games has signed to do a game for [this]" that I've seen. Like about Lucifer, the Chernobyl disaster or the Cultural Revolution.

benjipwns

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #42 on: September 23, 2018, 02:22:31 AM »
two articles about 2014-2017 at Telltale:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry
https://www.usgamer.net/articles/exclusive-how-a-culture-of-crunch-brought-telltale-from-critical-darlings-to-layoffs
Quote
But the success of The Walking Dead spurred the company to expand rapidly: in order to suit both its growing ambitions and keep investors happy, it became a company that many long-standing employees no longer recognized. “We went from a small and scrappy team to kind of a giant studio full of 300-plus people,” says former Telltale programmer and designer Andrew Langley, who worked at the studio from 2008 to 2015. “You walk around the office, and you don’t really recognize anybody anymore.”

Sources say the culture of the studio never properly adapted from its indie mentality to one more appropriate for its larger size. Tribal knowledge persisted over clearly documented processes, and a lack of communication among employees bred confusion. “Very rarely people were writing things down on a wiki or a confluence page or any sort of documentation,” says a former employee. “People were shifting so often that you would hear a version of a story that was actually weeks old, and the person telling you has no idea because that’s the last thing they heard.”
Quote
To keep up with the workload, the company started rotating developers in and out of different games during the development process, sometimes in ways that employees say made little sense. As the developer’s schedule grew more aggressive, management sought to remedy tighter turnarounds by adding more people to the department — a “solution” that did little to help the problem. As one former Telltale developer put it: nine women can’t make a baby in one month. “Focus on quality really started to shift to ‘let’s just get as many episodes out as we can,’” the source says.

Time management was a major issue. Release dates would often slip after games underwent multiple, extensive reviews that came with a great deal of feedback, but failed to budget enough time to make the changes. “The pace at which the studio operated was both an amazing feat and its biggest problem,” says a former employee. “Executives would often ask teams to rewrite, redesign, recast, and reanimate up until the very last minute without properly adjusting the schedule. The demands on production only became more intense with each successful release, and at some point, you just don’t have anything left to give.”
Quote
But where most developers go into “crunch mode” in the final months of a game leading up to its launch, they described it as constant. Because of the episodic nature of Telltale’s games, the studio’s development cycle was a constantly turning wheel. As soon as one episode wrapped, it was on to the next one, over and over with no end in sight. “Everything [was] always on fire,” one source with direct knowledge of the company says. “You never [got] a break.” This sentiment was echoed over and over to The Verge by four different people across several parts of Telltale.
Quote
One source told USGamer that, "At one point, there was a quote (printed on paper) on one of the creative director's doors that read something to the tune of, 'It's not about how much time you need to make a good game, it's about how good of a game you can make with the time you have.'" Several other sources confirmed they had also seen this sign.

Working on these franchises wasn't easy on employees either. One anonymous source said that having to work on games tied to existing IPs was sometimes seen "as a hindrance" due to the nature of working with an established IP. In addition, according to several sources, Telltale handed down "heavy rewrites" that could account for as much as "80 percent" of a game. And these rewrites would sometimes come very last minute.

"[Sometimes] team leadership would push through [with rewrites] anyway for one of many reasons—time, prestige, actual belief in subpar ideas," one source said. "And it would always come back on them in the end. We'd always eventually fix the product. But late fixes were deeply disruptive. [...] [These problems] could have been avoided by better decisions earlier in the process."

Inconsistent feedback was also cited as a problem. Another source said, "So much effort was spent reacting to reactions, and the notes would be wildly different every time. So a lot of time it resulted in schizophrenic [game] episodes cobbled together via contrary notes."
Quote
Bruner took over as CEO of Telltale in 2015 from Connors, who former employees described as a far less imposing figure. Numerous employees describe Bruner as cultivating a culture of fear, and a running joke at the company compared Bruner’s attention to the Eye of Sauron, the fiery gaze of the villain in The Lord of the Rings. “Inevitably, the Eye of Sauron looks at you, and that beam of light just blows everything up and makes it a hellscape where you don’t believe in a thing you’re building anymore,” says a former employee. “A lot of times at Telltale, you don’t feel like you’re wanted there.”

Executive review meetings with higher-ups like Bruner became infamous within the company as brutal, hours-long arguments where Bruner would belittle and question the choices of those involved with the studio’s projects, according to half a dozen sources. “When [Bruner] saw something he decided he didn’t like — which very often was exactly what he had asked for — [that] was really undeserved, and often really difficult for teams to deal with,” the source says.

Tulley Rafferty, a former Telltale programmer who worked at the company from 2008 until the November layoffs, agrees that the critiques were often devastating. “There was no warning. You go into the executive review, and they take a giant turd on you. That was your feedback: ‘We hate this thing that you made.’”

“I remember hearing one of my bosses say, ‘I love that we can just shout at each other and curse at each other in a meeting. It’s totally great,’” says one former employee.
Quote
After The Walking Dead, to describe one Telltale game was to describe all of them: an episodic adventure game that unfolded across sequentially released episodes, where players make difficult choices with emotional consequences. This became the creative mold at Telltale, where former employees say every new game was — to some degree — trying to recapture the spark of The Walking Dead. “Every game was held up to that standard, regardless of how realistic that was,” one source says.

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #43 on: September 23, 2018, 02:57:11 AM »
The crunch thing isn't surprising. Game development is a lot of normal time and even downright lazy time generally ended with a crunch. If you are constantly putting out stuff though, that crunch time will be never ending. It's a very hard path.

paprikastaude

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #44 on: September 23, 2018, 11:58:49 AM »
It wasn't exactly hard to comprehend that the impact of the choices were small overall. They shouldn't have always promoted "everything matters!" in the beginning, but other than that it was good enough imo. Not last because there's many stories that were ruined because of single character decisions. So giving me enough options to shape characterisation for my playthrough, even if the story was always forced back on track, was a good feature nevertheless. Like deciding whether the protagonist saves someone's live or not makes such a huge difference, even if the character in danger would clearly lose his importance going forward (to not complicate the story tree).

Either way, the horrendous bugs were unforgivable. Also, TWD1 was probably the last time it still felt like a streamlined adventure game instead of just a movie with minor choices. Can't really feel all that bad when they sacrificed quality for milking.

benjipwns

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #45 on: October 05, 2018, 07:36:10 PM »
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17934166/telltale-games-studio-closed-layoffs-end-the-walking-dead
Quote
How an award-winning studio abruptly shuttered, as told by the people who were there

thisismyusername

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #46 on: October 05, 2018, 07:47:06 PM »
Ah, yeah, I read that yesterday.

People living pay-check to pay-check in the Bay Area. WTF are studios doing there? :doge

Rufus

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #47 on: October 05, 2018, 08:14:42 PM »
Probably hit critical mass when rents weren't insane. Now it's a self-perpetuating nightmare.

Stoney Mason

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Re: RIP Telltale Games (probably)
« Reply #48 on: October 22, 2018, 07:24:37 PM »