Truly a shame, their take on Batman was one of the freshest, most enjoyable takes on the character I’ve ever seen. I hope someone at DC picks up those writers and finds a way to carry on that continunity.

Man, I was just replaying the first 3 seasons of TWD so I could start the last season with all my choices.
This is a real bummer. I've bought everything Telltale has ever made (except Minecraft). I even have a folder on the PS4 that is called Telltale....

I believe the episode stuff backfired at them, slowly but steadily. I assume that the Telltale business model generally hinged on people jumping in after the first or second episode of a given "show" and keep grabbing each episode full-price once released. However, the smart thing has always been to wait for sales on the finished seasons and get them for like 20 bucks or in ludicrous package deals. Combined with the increasing "staleness" of their output in recent years they were pretty much doomed.

This is relentlessly depressing. I absolutely adored their Batman stuff, and The Walking Dead as well. This is a terrible way for it all to end.

I would probably have kept playing those Batman games until the end of time, even if I was mostly indifferent to their other franchises.

This was such a bummer to wake up to.
I was Really looking forward to the 2nd season of Wolf Among Us... Well, i'll always have that first game that I enjoyed so much.
Everything i've seen of that new season of Walking Dead looked pretty good too. But I didn't buy it, so I guess i wasn't exactly helping the situation..

This surprised me when it popped up on my news feed last night. I knew they were niche, but I figured that the Minecraft game must have made some money, and I figured the Batman games and Walking Dead games still had a fanbase for them to keep making them. I've been meaning to check out the Batman games and never got around to Tales of the Borderlands, either. I'll have to play those at least out of respect for those that lost their jobs here.

That is a shame, and I hate that people will now have to scramble for jobs.

@fakekisser: Oh man, you're in for a treat. TFTB and Batman are two of their absolute best series.

Terrible news for the folks at Telltale. I never played their games but they seemed to be some of the best in telling stories in the video game medium. Sounds like lots of game companies are reaching out to those who just lost their jobs and that's comforting to know companies are trying to give people new jobs. Best of luck to the former Telltale workers.

@shagge I've heard great things. I just go in phases with playing adventure games and then not playing them for long periods, and Wadget Eye and some other adventure game makers have gotten my attention the last few years while I've been in those phases. :D

250 people laid off without severance. They were hiring people up until this past Monday... Not sure what their management was thinking.

They weren't thinking and seems they had no clue how to run a business. It will be interesting to see what comes from this. There are a likely a lot of disgruntled employees that I wouldn't be surprised will be talking about what actually happened.

Pretty surprised by this. I assumed having licenses like Game of Thrones, Minecraft, and Batman meant they were selling a lot of games by default. Also surprised because everyone says that the Batman seasons and Tales from the Borderlands are great, so if they were still making good games I thought they would sell well. Had no clue this was gonna happen to them.

I always wanted to play more of their games but only really played that first season of Walking Dead. Seems like that's what a lot of other people did too which would explain all this.

Boy, the management really drove this studio directly into a wall at 200mph, huh.

There is zero silver lining here. 200+ people have to try to find jobs in the latter part of the year. Projects people were looking forward to are shit-canned. They won't even be able to close out Clementine's story in the final WD season.

I hope some writers get to the bottom of just how this all happened.

It would be beyond awful if they don't even get the chance to finish the final season of Walking Dead. The only silver lining to all this would have been that at least they get to see their defining story to its end. If they can't even do that, it makes an impossibly depressing situation even worse.

Didn't matter how much work they put in, how much unpaid overtime or crunch time they suffered through, or how much ass they kissed. Management cut 90% of the staff with no severance pay and no health insurance past the end of next week just to balance a few numbers on a sheet. The devs/artists/other staff need to start unionizing or this shit will repeat itself at the next studio they go to.

@dochaus: Why is shit like that not illegal.

@farleyslundgren: Because there is a lot of money to be mad in preventing unions from existing, and unions have since gone too far in the other direction so a lot of people rightly have some reservations about the excesses and problems they can bring. Just look at Walmart, Amazon and etc and see similar shitty conditions that desperately need unionizing..but also see how prices would go up for everyone who uses those services if unions ever did become a thing. Generally speaking? Unions are a political issue. Democrats for, Republicans against at least in America. Thus, its one of many different issues that gets money and political capital spent on both sides. It certainly won't be illegal when one of the two major parties in charge doesn't believe it should be.

Also, off topic to that but on topic for the thread. This sucks. I really liked the two batman games they did, their take on that fiction was refreshing and interesting. I'm genuinely sad to see so few people gave those games a chance/got to play them. I would highly recommend people pick up both seasons on sale if they get the chance and your at all interested. Even baring a season 3 the story-telling they do in the two existing seasons is pretty good IMO.

Without getting into it too much, there are places that certainly need Unions just to keep companies from treating their workforce like shit. Where I work, people didn't get pay raises for over a decade and there was other stuff involving working extra hours (not overtime mind you) and having people come into work only to just send them home without pay unless you wanted to use vacation to pay yourself. So we unionized and were able to make a deal where things are better. Some people aren't that lucky though, so it's kind of a gamble all around.

I'm pretty bummed about Telltale going out of business. I was really looking forward to Wolf Among Us 2 because I loved the first game so much. I wasn't really interested terribly in most of the rest of their IPs and it seems like the general audience wasn't either from the chart the OP showed. Still, it sucks and I hope everyone is able to land on their feet. This industry seems to be pretty decent at scooping people when stuff like this happens

That chart in the first post is blowing my mind. With Telltale putting out so many projects at such a rapid clip I always assumed they were raking in the dough.

@l33t_haxor: Nope, they were wasting all the dough they made with the walking dead shooting in all possible directions, I guess greed got the best of them, they could have kept it small, doing one project at a time, and doing it well, and they would have kept going almost indefinitely.

I don't know anything about business in general, that much about the game industry, or anything about how higher-ups in Telltale work, but the sudden closure seems to have happened because of a hail mary gone south. They had to be struggling with lower and lower sales and stretching out what games they can license. Too many fingers in too many pots. Normally what would happen would be some downsizing instead of a tactical nuke of firing 98% of their company. Either somebody up top was blind or stubborn, or there was a deal they were working on to make everything float for longer. Something like expecting a buyout from a major company (like the recent studio acquiring Microsoft for instance). The deal was cancelled or waved away and payroll/bills/debts all came to a head at once and the only thing that could save the asses (and wallets) of the top execs was an immediate closure. That's my completely amateurish and horribly illformed take on it so please don't straight up take what I have as rumor or hearsay

I'm glad that a lot of studios are reaching out and letting everyone know that they have lots of openings available. Lots of great studios are going to get a lot of great talent.

I hope everyone fired and about to be fired manages to get on their feet as soon as they can.

Just as an update to this thread, since I noticed I don't see a lot mentioning it. There have been some great olive branches and gestures by other studios in the community, including Ubisoft, Blizzard, and a few other bigger devs I've seen with openings in the area where a lot of layoffs happen. Obviously it's still early, but it's nice to see people recognize the talent that was at TellTale and it makes one be optimistic in regards to hopefully seeing a lot of the devs affected, if not all, land on their feet somewhere else.

I think there are some key differences there, mainly that THQNordic is owned by the larger Nordic corporation which has other successful business ventures. Plus the owner was smart enough to mostly open studios in Eastern Europe where costs of living and therefore costs of development are much lower than in Scandinavia. Combined with tax breaks and such in Poland where the publishing arm is based, and there are a lot of smart, cost saving decisions being made there.

Also on the development front they have smartly had studios first focus on remastering old titles both to judge demand and get the team's feet wet. The number of brand new entries they have put out has been fairly small and initially focused on low investment titles like MX Vs ATV.

As far as Telltale goes, this sounds like a case of mismanagement and over ambition.

It’s a shame for the fans and for the people who have to go looking for a new job. Personally, I really enjoyed Tales of Monkey Island and the Walking Dead, but I have to say my enjoyment of the games lessened with each game. Can’t say I’m surprised.

Just awful news. I hope the upper management at Tell Tale never show their faces in this industry again.

@the_atomic_dumpling: Good point. I hated waiting between episodes, so I always bought the games when the last episode was out or near.

Typically, the game was 50% of cheaper by that point.

@burncoat: They downsized about a year ago. At the same time, the committed to updating their aging technology AND changing their business model to releasing less games, with the intention of making the quality of each product higher.

They were making the right moves, it sounds like they just made them too late and ran out of time and money.

From the outside looking in, releasing multiple VERY similar games, 1/5th to 1/6th at a time, over the course of a year seemed like oversaturation. It always felt like the games needed to be more unique or less frequent. It sounds like this mindset hit the business later than it should have, though...

@l33t_haxor: I don’t know how long their sales tails are on these games, but you’d hope someone would have been pushing for immediate action WELL before their structural changes in 2017. That Game of Thrones-era drop-off is scary.

Of course, I don’t know what they spent on games as time went on, what they sold for (steam sales obscure this stuff). Is it safe to assume that the player count is closer to what they sold AROUND retail price?

Anyhow, it’s a bummer, but that chart aligns with perception/mindshare, from what I recall.

The best/worst thing regarding the chart is its only counting one episode not the entire season and in many cases episode one was given away free, and it looks like only season one of The Walking Dead and Minecraft were profitable everything else flopped. Telltale were also massive up until Nov last year they were ~400 strong in comparison dontnod the folks behind Life is Strange and Vampyr number ~166.

Only Minecraft And The Walking Dead Season 1 Were Profitable For Telltale, Batman Was A Huge Flop

Good way to avoid having to actually write an ending to the walking dead tho

it turns out telltale were the real walking dead

My whole problem with this, looking at the sales figures is, why they didnt realise sooner, how could it get this far and making the same kinda games not really trying anything different, i always assumed their games were selling alot better, otherwise why keep going with the same old, even if i did enjoy the ones i played

No chance of a sequel to Borderlands now :(

I loved the first season of The Walking Dead and I really liked The Wolf Among Us, but after playing Game Of Thrones I gave up on their wooden animations and haven't played one of their games since.

I nonetheless hope all involved lands on their feet.

Not sure what this means for all the people laid off but it's something.

Any word on refunds?

While I've always said that their games were more fun to watch than actually play, I did want to see an ending to Clementine's story.

@milkman: Hrmmm. Not really sure what to make of that. If the staff hadn't just gotten cut loose so abruptly and on such poor terms I could see that working out somehow. But even if they got them to come back now I have to imagine their passion for the project would be greatly diminished, to say the least.

Or they contract a bunch of outside people to do it that had nothing to with the project in the first place so the former employees get double screwed. :/

I hope one of these potential partners takes over The Walking Dead and the final game just absolutely kills it.

@liquiddragon: I got in on that fantastic entire collection preorder bonus so if they don't offer compensation (if this last ditch effort to save episodes 3&4 doesn't work out) I'll be fine.

Potential partners sounds kinda crappy. Cheaper to do that than keep your own staff around? Now I’m kinda hoping that the old VAs refuse to come back and they have to replace them mid-season.

@liquiddragon: I'd say if you got a refund it would be just about the worst thing ever. I mean, it would stink for you, the person that pre ordered the recent season and didn't get the conclusion but like...lots of people are WAY worse off.

This whole thing sucks but maybe it will be a focal point of change in the future? (it won't, which is even more sad).

I don't care about Telltale's games, but it's always a bummer when people lose their jobs.

I hope they find a way to keep using their talent and making the games they want to make.

I certainly don't think it should be shameful in this situation for consumers to be demanding refunds though. Sure reflection and understanding that you are not the absolute center of this situation is perhaps needed for some people but you can't just brush it aside.

I never felt the need to actually buy Telltale's games, but the ones I've watched have been great, novel stories that were always interesting, especially their take on Batman.

Hope everyone lands on their feet and gets to spread the magic elsewhere.

@efesell: I don't mean to imply that wanting a refund would make you a bad person and I'm sorry if I did...I guess I just think that if I were an aware consumer I would think the refund is the least of my problems. I'm sure people are being done much more dirty in this situation from what I've read than any person that spent money ahead of time on this piece of entertainment are experiencing. If people that put years into the company are getting no severance because there is no money, I don't even know where the refunds would come from anyway.

I don't think anyone wants to see some outside team come in and finish the last two episodes, even if the writing is largely finished for them. The only way I think it's possible to feel good about this series finishing is if some other company brings in the whole Walking Dead team. I have no idea if that is feasible or even possible but any other outcome would feel gross and exploitative.

@milkman: It’s a rough one. How many options do you have to do right by customers, given the state of the studio. How does weighing-in doing right by employees impact things? There’s also financial obligations and doing right by investors.

Making anything good out of this seems nightmarishly difficult, and anything you do right will lead to some subset of people saying you did wrong by someone.

It’s a rough one, but I’d really love to see this handled as gracefully as possible.