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Telltale all but closed

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Straight Edge Raven
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Telltale all but closed

Post by Straight Edge Raven »

All but 25 employees laid off. All future games cancelled. Hopefully they'll finish "The Walking Dead:The Final Season". Episode 2 is out next week.
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YBBR
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by YBBR »

Straight Edge Raven wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 6:11 pm All but 25 employees laid off. All future games cancelled. Hopefully they'll finish "The Walking Dead:The Final Season". Episode 2 is out next week.
Heard this on Giant Bomb. Those 25 will be a skeleton crew to finish the Walking Dead and fulfill obligations to publishers. Everything else is canceled and then when finished, those people will be released. No severance for any employees. The studio is done.

Shoving 250 people out the door, and shuttering the studio, sure does suck. And some of the work they did was good for sure, those games never interested me, but yeah, sucks for everyone involved.
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Straight Edge Raven
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Straight Edge Raven »

There are some reports out there The Walking Dead won't even be finished. If true hopefully some other studio will save it. I want to know how Clementines story ends!
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Straight Edge Raven
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Straight Edge Raven »

Does make you wonder what happened. Seemed like a successful studio. Batman, Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, and others, plus future titles. They should have had enough money if you look at their catalog and popularity. Sad to see them go.
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YBBR
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by YBBR »

Straight Edge Raven wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:06 pm Does make you wonder what happened. Seemed like a successful studio. Batman, Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, and others, plus future titles. They should have had enough money if you look at their catalog and popularity. Sad to see them go.
Grew way too fast it seemed. They had multiple teams work on multiple games all licensed and when sales buckle with those kind of properties, it all goes to shit very fast. If they scaled it back and did fewer projects with more focus, they might still be around.
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DC4MVP
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by DC4MVP »

YBBR wrote: Sat Sep 22, 2018 8:54 pm
Straight Edge Raven wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:06 pm Does make you wonder what happened. Seemed like a successful studio. Batman, Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, and others, plus future titles. They should have had enough money if you look at their catalog and popularity. Sad to see them go.
Grew way too fast it seemed. They had multiple teams work on multiple games all licensed and when sales buckle with those kind of properties, it all goes to shit very fast. If they scaled it back and did fewer projects with more focus, they might still be around.
That's what it seems like.

You gotta stay niche for a long while and focus on ONE thing before you start branching off. You gotta make sure you have that capitol built up just in case the market does dip.

Lot of companies try and grow too fast and can't steer the ship back on course because they spread the money too thin.
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Herky
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Herky »

YBBR wrote: Sat Sep 22, 2018 8:54 pm
Straight Edge Raven wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:06 pm Does make you wonder what happened. Seemed like a successful studio. Batman, Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, and others, plus future titles. They should have had enough money if you look at their catalog and popularity. Sad to see them go.
Grew way too fast it seemed. They had multiple teams work on multiple games all licensed and when sales buckle with those kind of properties, it all goes to shit very fast. If they scaled it back and did fewer projects with more focus, they might still be around.
I read they expanded their workforce 500% when they added all the new titles. Sounds like the layoffs came out of nowhere and nobody was paid severance. The video game business seems glamorous but there is no union for them and many people work a ton of hours and don't get compensated as well as you'd think. Telltale sounded like they really mismanaged things and tried to put out too many games. I don't know how successful they all were top to bottom but they were pumping out a lot of titles recently. I heard there were issues back when The Wolf Among Us had some release issues and then they announced they were doing other titles and pretty much abandoned it.

Sucks we will never see some of their games come to an end. I really like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Game Of Thrones. Never played Minecraft Story Mode, Tales From Borderlands, or Guardians Of The Galaxy.
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Herky
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Herky »

Here are the list of titles they were working on when they started to get popular. It's pretty easy to see they took on way too much and had some games that didn't sell/review well because they were just branching out too much. Had they just stuck with Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us they might have had better luck down the road. They needed a new engine too but they put out games so fast I doubt they even had time to look at upgrading graphics.

The Walking Dead: April 24, 2012—November 20, 2012/July 2, 2013 (400 Days)
The Wolf Among Us: October 11, 2013—July 8, 2014
The Walking Dead: Season Two- December 17, 2013—August 26, 2014
Tales from the Borderlands: November 25, 2014—October 20, 2015
Game of Thrones: December 2, 2014—November 17, 2015
Minecraft: Story Mode: October 13, 2015—March 29, 2016/June 7, 2016—September 13, 2016 (Adventure Pass)
The Walking Dead: Michonne: February 23, 2016—April 26, 2016
Batman: The Telltale Series: August 8, 2017—March 27, 2018
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier: December 20, 2016—May 30, 2017
Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series: April 18, 2017—November 7, 2017
Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two: July 11, 2017—December 19, 2017
Batman: The Enemy Within: August 8, 2017—March 27, 2018
The Walking Dead: The Final Season: August 14, 2018—December 18, 2018

They were planning on making a season two for Wolf Among Us and Game Of Thrones, and were talking about a Stranger Things game. They also had been talking about a zombie mobile game that wasn't like The Walking Dead. The company just expanded way too fast and tried to put out too many random titles too quickly.
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YBBR
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Re: Telltale all but closed

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Their engine was weird. Was not a fan of that.

13 games in the span of 6 years is fucking insane. I don't care how many teams you have. And actually their most recent stuff was pretty good I heard. Minecraft, and people really liked Batman, and heard the last season of Walking Dead was shaping up very nicely.
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Herky
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Re: Telltale all but closed

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Minecraft Season 1 and 2, The Walking Dead: Michonne, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, and Guardians of the Galaxy all weren't reviewed well overall. Why they did a Minecraft game makes no sense to me, and same with Guardians of the Galaxy. Batman was really good and so was Game Of Thrones but they really could have done without Minecraft and GOTG.
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Re: Telltale all but closed

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YBBR wrote: Mon Sep 24, 2018 2:23 pm Their engine was weird. Was not a fan of that.

13 games in the span of 6 years is fucking insane. I don't care how many teams you have. And actually their most recent stuff was pretty good I heard. Minecraft, and people really liked Batman, and heard the last season of Walking Dead was shaping up very nicely.
I've been reading a lot of what the former employees have been saying on Twitter and it sounds like they worked crazy hours and had limited timelines to get games done. That's why they should have just focused on a few games at a time and then maybe branch out later. The fact that The Wolf Among Us was put on the back burner was disappointing. Should have just focused on a few games right away.
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YBBR
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Re: Telltale all but closed

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Herky wrote: Mon Sep 24, 2018 2:27 pm Minecraft Season 1 and 2, The Walking Dead: Michonne, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, and Guardians of the Galaxy all weren't reviewed well overall. Why they did a Minecraft game makes no sense to me, and same with Guardians of the Galaxy. Batman was really good and so was Game Of Thrones but they really could have done without Minecraft and GOTG.
I played the first episode of The Walking Dead and the first episode of GoT, and that was it. Those games never really hooked me. Just wasn't my cup of tea.
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Straight Edge Raven
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Re: Telltale all but closed

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Re: Telltale all but closed

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That money should go to the goddamn developers and team members they fucking fired without any severance. Fuck the video game at this point.
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Herky
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Herky »

YBBR wrote: Mon Sep 24, 2018 10:02 pm That money should go to the goddamn developers and team members they fucking fired without any severance. Fuck the video game at this point.
Especially since they were told they weren't getting severance because they company had no money. There is a lawsuit being filed over this and rightfully so.

The video game industry needs a union to regulate this stuff. I know unions aren't what they used to be but they were created to keep companies for being assholes to their workers and this industry needs some regulation there.
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Re: Telltale all but closed

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Herky wrote: Wed Sep 26, 2018 9:00 am
YBBR wrote: Mon Sep 24, 2018 10:02 pm That money should go to the goddamn developers and team members they fucking fired without any severance. Fuck the video game at this point.
Especially since they were told they weren't getting severance because they company had no money. There is a lawsuit being filed over this and rightfully so.

The video game industry needs a union to regulate this stuff. I know unions aren't what they used to be but they were created to keep companies for being assholes to their workers and this industry needs some regulation there.
Yep, I agree. There has been a push to unionize among employees for a bit now. I hope they do because sadly situations like Telltale are not that uncommon. A lot of former employees from there talking a bunch of yang about how poorly they were treated. Shit is just wrong.
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Herky »

YBBR wrote: Wed Sep 26, 2018 3:16 pm
Herky wrote: Wed Sep 26, 2018 9:00 am
YBBR wrote: Mon Sep 24, 2018 10:02 pm That money should go to the goddamn developers and team members they fucking fired without any severance. Fuck the video game at this point.
Especially since they were told they weren't getting severance because they company had no money. There is a lawsuit being filed over this and rightfully so.

The video game industry needs a union to regulate this stuff. I know unions aren't what they used to be but they were created to keep companies for being assholes to their workers and this industry needs some regulation there.
Yep, I agree. There has been a push to unionize among employees for a bit now. I hope they do because sadly situations like Telltale are not that uncommon. A lot of former employees from there talking a bunch of yang about how poorly they were treated. Shit is just wrong.
I can't remember the game or studio but I remember workers talking about pulling 60-70 hour weeks with sometimes no days off for long periods of time in order to get a game launched with no overtime pay. Then when the game was finished they were right back working on the next one. Some studios like BioWare seem like good places to work, but there isn't any regulation so it opens the doors for mistreatment or high demands from other companies. Seems like there are a lot of disgruntled people in that industry and it's not as glamourous as it seems.

Ken Levine said working on BioShock Infinite stressed him out so much he walked away from making another one. That's the lead writer getting fed up and you know he was making good money. I can't imagine what it's like for the rest of the team especially the people in the trenches coding day after day. I have been a web developer and programmer before and that can drive you nuts just sitting there in front of a screen all day writing code.
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by salamander »

Did they ever really make anything truly great?

There were a couple good games in there sure but this is a studio that nobody will miss.
It's been 32 years since one of MN's four major sports teams has been to the Championship/Superbowl.
Every single year is failure until we win one. 4 teams, 32 years. That's roughly 128 consecutive failed seasons.
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Herky »

salamander wrote: Wed Sep 26, 2018 4:25 pm Did they ever really make anything truly great?

There were a couple good games in there sure but this is a studio that nobody will miss.
The Walking Dead series was great I thought. Their games usually got pretty positive reviews overall.
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Straight Edge Raven
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Straight Edge Raven »

"The Wolf Among Us" was well regarded as well.
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Straight Edge Raven
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Straight Edge Raven »

:)

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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by salamander »

Herky wrote: Wed Sep 26, 2018 7:29 pm
salamander wrote: Wed Sep 26, 2018 4:25 pm Did they ever really make anything truly great?

There were a couple good games in there sure but this is a studio that nobody will miss.
The Walking Dead series was great I thought. Their games usually got pretty positive reviews overall.
I guess I never played them. I might have to go back and check them out.
It's been 32 years since one of MN's four major sports teams has been to the Championship/Superbowl.
Every single year is failure until we win one. 4 teams, 32 years. That's roughly 128 consecutive failed seasons.
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Re: Telltale all but closed

Post by Herky »

I’m replaying The Walking Dead on Xbox One. Have one chapter left in Season Two. Game still hopes up and I’m having fun revisiting the series. Never played Season 3 so this will be all new stuff from here on out.
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