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The Walking Dead Developer Telltale Games Reportedly Shutting Down

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keone

WORLD WAR K aka Sensei ALMONDZ
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Telltale Games, the developer behind numerous adventure video games, including an episodic series based on The Walking Dead, will lay off the majority of its staff, effectively closing the studio. Only 25 employees will remain, while 225 more will lose their jobs.

While the studio enjoyed plenty of success and critical acclaim after The Walking Dead and other titles like The Wolf Among Us, Telltale still underwent through turbulent times. Just last November, Telltale laid off 25 percent of their workforce, a total of 90 people, as the company attempted to restructure. Even after the unfortunate news, the studio pressed on, promising to release their final season of The Walking Dead, along with a second season of The Wolf Among Us and a new game based on Stranger Things.

Related: The Walking Dead: The Final Season Episode 1 Review

Many of these plans will never come to fruition, with Telltale essentially shutting down. The Verge reports that multiple sources within the studio confirmed the massive layoffs, while USGamer reported that The Wolf Among Us and the Stranger Things game were both canceled - The Walking Dead: The Final Season, which still has three episodes left planned for release, will be completed by the leftover skeleton crew. Later, Telltale co-founder and former CEO Kevin Bruner, who is suing the company over breach of contract, confirmed the news on a blog post. As the final nail in the coffin, the "majority studio closure" was made official with a statement from Telltale CEO Pete Hawley via the company's Twitter account.

View image on Twitter





The closure of this studio is shocking to the gaming community - after the success of season 1 of The Walking Dead in 2012, the longevity of the studio was unquestioned. But the company, originally famous for the Sam & Max series, took on an unprecedented number of projects, arguably spreading the company too thin. These projects included games based on Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Batman - most of these titles receiving mixed reactions from players compared to the positive reviews of The Walking Dead. The previous layoffs may have been an attempt to control the studio's workload, but this apparently was not enough.

It certainly doesn't help that the studio's later games suffered technical issues, with their game engine the Telltale Tool being infamous for its buggy nature. Despite this criticism, Telltale stuck with the engine, only pledging to move on from it after The Walking Dead's final season. Additionally, the company's employees were reportedly subjected to mismanagement, and overall work overload. With poor and unhealthy business practices and a dated graphics engine, the closure of Telltale Games may not be too much a surprise for those following the company. Studio layoffs are always unfortunate - Capcom Vancouver just suffered from its own closure. Hopefully, these laid-off employees will find their footing with new jobs, and perhaps if the final episodes of The Walking Dead are well received, it will be a proper send-off for the company after this unfortunate and tumultuous behind-the-scenes experience.
 
man...fuck them games...I’m still pissed @ the game of thrones one that had me think my decisions mattered only to have the same major outcomes in most instances...then niggas tried to shitsplain it...talking about it’s not about the outcome...the true experience is playing thru the storyline...fuck outta here
 
https://www.usgamer.net/articles/re...-wolf-among-us-2-and-stranger-things-canceled

Sources: Telltale Games Closes Majority of Studio, The Wolf Among Us 2 and Stranger Things Canceled [Update, Correction]

Update: We have an official statement from Telltale.

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News by Matt Kim, 09/21/2018.

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Update 4 [4:12pm]: As information continues to come out of today's announcement that Telltale Games is closing, and particularly in light of Telltale's statement, there are new revelations to the situation at Telltale. blog calling the layoffs at Telltale a "closure." Seemingly confirming the fate of the studio he co-founded. our report following the layoffs, sources told us that following The Walking Dead Telltale suffered from a constant culture of crunch that pushed employees to release games as quickly as possible. In addition to overbearing management teams that oftentimes meddled in projects, the Telltale Tool proprietary engine was prone to bugs, making development even more difficult. Exclusive: How a Culture of Crunch Brought Telltale From Critical Darling to Layoffs

:: Sony Announces the PlayStation Classic Mini-Console

Telltale is currently in the middle of The Walking Dead Final Season and have previously announced a second season of The Wolf Among Us and a game based on the Netflix hit series Stranger Things. An anonymous source familiar with the company told USgamer that a skeleton crew will remain at Telltale to work on Minecraft Story Mode for Netflix while The Wolf Among Us Season 2 and Stranger Things are effectively cancelled. [Updated above] The Verge is reporting that 25 employees will stay on board, presumably as part of the skeleton crew.

 
Telltale Games’ successes did more for TV shows than they did for the studio
The underappreciated Game of Thrones adaptation is a marker for the studio’s demise
By Owen S. Good@owengood Sep 22, 2018, 12:48pm EDTSHARE
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Jon Snow and Gared Tuttle at The Wall in Game of Thrones: A Telltale Series
Telltale Games
This perspective contains spoilers for Game of Thrones, both the TV series and the Telltale video game.

When news passed late yesterday that Telltale Games had effectively shut down, dismissing all but a handful of artists, many thought first of The Walking Dead, and its fate. I thought of Game of Thrones.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season, which premiered in August, is said to be canceled, three days before its second episode was due to launch. It’s a poetically shocking demise for a series where the death of a treasured character was always on the table. For me, it was dispiriting to realize that after a few years of chatter, the second season of Telltale’s excellent adaptation of GoT would end up being another log in video gaming’s what-if fireplace.

Critically, Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series’ scores hovered around the kiss-of-death mid-70s. I don’t really care. It — not a show, not a book — was my first exposure to Westeros. The game was a lark offering on PlayStation Plus in July 2017 and it, not the seventh season’s premiere that month, enthralled me.

I was drawn to the Forresters, the minor clan and Stark allies written exclusively for this game. I became as bloodthirsty in my desire for vengeance for them as any hard-bitten fan ever was for Arya and her house. Though I didn’t know him fully, I knew Ramsay was a major character, and I recoiled from him, knowing I could not make him pay for killing Ethan Forrester. But Gryff Whitehill suffered dearly in his stead, I assure you.

The game ends on an anguishing cliff-hanger, though, and House Forrester nowhere near made whole. It ended up being a pitch-perfect indoctrination into Game of Thrones’ overall mood, seething with tension and delayed gratification. I bought a subscription to HBO Now the day after I finished it and began powering through the seasons. Telltale’s Game of Thrones should have spoiled large tranches of seasons one through five — it begins outside The Red Wedding, for God’s sake. But everything it revealed about the TV show left me wanting to know more, not less.

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Despite playing more than three seasons of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, I was never drawn to AMC’s TV show for a single episode.
Telltale Games
Until last summer, I’d spent years avoiding the TV franchise despite the raves of friends and colleagues. I had edited several Monday morning recaps and takes for Polygon in 2015 and 2016, and with those seasons effectively revealed, Game of Thrones, as a show, became I’ll-get-around-to-it TV for me. Well, Telltale Games finally got me around to it. Yet even playing everything it offered for The Walking Dead — including 400 Days and Michonne — I was never drawn to AMC for a single episode.

It’s probably because, while Game of Thrones: A Telltale Series is an original story with original lead characters, it is woven into the TV story where The Walking Dead’s three seasons (and its abortive fourth) wholly stand apart from both the comic book and the TV series. No, I wasn’t going to find any mention on HBO of Rodrik Forrester, or Gared kicking Britt off The Wall. But the sips of intrigue in King’s Landing and adventure in Meereen had me thirsting for more, and I had somewhere I could find it.

Remembering the only choice that mattered in Telltale’s The Walking Dead[/paste:font]
I doubt I was the only one who felt this way, although the numbers of those who did were clearly not strong enough to make a Game of Thrones sequel a Telltale priority. Still, my experience with that game, and my gravitation into Game of Thrones fandom, is why I consider it Telltale’s most complete success.

Video game adaptations of television and film — excepting Batman, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings (and Lego) — have a history as inconsistent as TV and film adaptations of video games. Atlus’ Game of Thrones RPG in 2012 was a dud. No one is clamoring for Overkill’s The Walking Dead shooter, whose November launch on PC will surely be the most overlooked release of the calendar. The great tragedy of Telltale Games is that it made these franchises work as both games and a story — even taking Game of the Year honors — and it meant nothing for the studio’s long-term fate.

Rights-holders license their works to video games for a number of reasons, and sure, the money a studio’s willing to pay to stomp around in a canon with a ready-made audience is a big one. But video games are also valuable in turning on new audiences to the shows and films. Telltale did more for Game of Thrones than Game of Thrones did for it, and The Walking Dead, too. And as Netflix shops, or more likely mothballs, the Stranger Thingsvehicle that was coming — assuming it can even find someone who’d do it half as well — you and I won’t be the only ones lamenting the loss of Telltale Games.
 
The Walking Dead developer Telltale hit with devastating layoffs as part of a ‘majority studio closure’
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By Megan Farokhmanesh@Megan_Nicolett Sep 21, 2018, 3:30pm EDTSHARE
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Telltale Games, creators of episodic adventure games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Batman: The Enemy Within, laid off approximately 250 employees today as part of what the company is calling a “majority studio closure.” According to multiple sources The Verge spoke with, employees were let go with no severance.

“Today Telltale Games made the difficult decision to begin a majority studio closure following a year marked by insurmountable challenges,” the company said in a statement. “A majority of the company’s employees were dismissed earlier this morning.” The company will retain a small team of 25. These remaining employees will stay on “to fulfill the company’s obligations to its board and partners,” according to Telltale.

The final season of Telltale’s award-winning series, The Walking Dead, kicked off last month. The second episode is slated to launch next week. Staff were informed of the layoffs today and were given roughly 30 minutes to leave the building, according to one source.

Telltale had previously announced a second season of The Wolf Among Us and a game based off of Netflix’s wildly popular show Stranger Things. The company has not yet commented on the status of those projects, though the outcome seems dire. On Twitter, one former lead writer wrote, “I’m so sad we won’t be able to show you all Wolf.”

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Castro
READ NEXT: TOXIC MANAGEMENT COST AN AWARD-WINNING GAME STUDIO ITS BEST DEVELOPERS
The layoffs come a few months after revelations that Telltale was a studio mired in toxic management that included employees being subjected to constant overwork. Once an industry darling that worked on iconic brands like Game of Thrones and Minecraft, Telltale quickly spiraled. In June, co-founder and former CEO Kevin Bruner sued the company seeking recovery of financial damages. Telltale described the suit as “meritless” and “an apparent means of extracting revenge on a company already under financial strain.”

In a post on his personal site today titled “Telltale closure,” Bruner wrote that he is “saddened for the people who are losing their jobs at a studio they love. And I’m also saddened at the loss of a studio that green-lit crazy ideas that no one else would consider.”

This isn’t the first time Telltale has been subject to layoffs; last November the company laid off 90 employees, which was approximately 25 percent of its workforce. “The realities of the environment we face moving forward demand we evolve, as well, reorienting our organization with a focus on delivering fewer, better games with a smaller team,” CEO Pete Hawley said at the time.

“It’s been an incredibly difficult year for Telltale as we worked to set the company on a new course,” Hawley said today. “Unfortunately, we ran out of time trying to get there. We released some of our best content this year and received a tremendous amount of positive feedback, but ultimately, that did not translate to sales. With a heavy heart, we watch our friends leave today to spread our brand of storytelling across the games industry.”

Update September 21st 5:40PM ET: This article has been updated with Telltale’s statement about the layoffs.
 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insert...son-4-may-never-end-up-finished/#25e37e215395

Telltale's Surprise Closure Means 'The Walking Dead: Season 4' May Never End Up Finished

While it’s always a sad day when a game studio closes and people lose their jobs, the industry was rocked yesterday by the shocking news that interactive fiction giant Telltale was suddenly shutting down, laying off 250 employees while a skeleton crew remained to tie up a few lose ends.

It’s a devastating story, one that everyone will by trying to puzzle out for a long while now, as most employees, including Telltale’s own PR repdoesn’t seem to have any clue as to what actually happened here. The surprise shut down has resulted in these 250 employees getting laid off without any severance, health care that runs out in a week, and no idea how they’re able to stay in the Bay Area, some of whom recently relocated with their families to get there.

Fans and industry players have rallied around the workers, and studio after studio has been sending out notices for available jobs at places like Sony Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, Gearbox and more, so hopefully the talented Telltale staff will end up better places when all is said and done. But the interim is bound to be terrifying.





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The Wolf Among UsTELLTALE

This has been such a sudden development that it’s thrown the state of essentially every ongoing Telltale project into disarray. Some things are obvious, like Telltale’s Game of Thrones and The Wolf Among Us not getting new seasons. The upcoming Stranger Things game has been cancelled. But now there’s word that The Walking Dead Season 4, the conclusion of Clementine’s story, may not even see its final two chapters released because of how fully and totally Telltale has been gutted. This is infuriating fans, many of whom not only paid for the full set of chapters, but also clearly want to see how Clementine’s tale ends after beginning the journey in 2012, six years ago.

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Reportedly, the only project that a tiny crew of 25 or so will remain working on is the Minecraft: Story Mode game they were making for Netflix, which appears to be a contractual obligation they have to fulfil or risk the wrath of the streaming giant.

What exactly happened to Telltale? That’s a question that’s going to be asked for weeks and months to come. The obvious answer is that the games just were not selling well. Supposedly very few Telltale games have actually ended up profitable. For me personally, while I loved the idea of Telltale games and early entries like The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead Season 1, waiting eons for new episodes was exhausting to the point where I just waited for full seasons to be out before buying, if I bought them at all. And eventually, it became somewhat clear that these games weren’t really evolving in meaningful ways, either from a storytelling or gameplay perspective, as your choices, no matter what they were, always seemed to lead you down the same path no matter what, for the most part.

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The Walking DeadTELLTALE

But besides the flagging popularity of the model, back in March, The Verge published a scorching piece about how Telltale’s “toxic management” cost the studio its best developers. Here’s an excerpt:

“Some managers would try to alleviate the pain of crunch by supplying overtime workers with food or alcohol, “token gestures” sources say were an effort to make the process as comfortable as possible. “They were putting a Band-Aid on a wound that had been there for years,” the source says. “They were just trying to get their job done right now, but nobody was looking long-term and being like, ‘This is unsustainable.’”

As it turns out, it was indeed unsustainable.

It always felt like Telltale was taking on just way too many projects. The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy, Borderlands, Minecraft, Batman, Stranger Things. All since 2012. The appeal of landing these IPs was attractive, no doubt, but it was just too much.

This is a very, very sad situation for Telltale’s talented staff, who deserved better. And fans will be disappointed they won’t finish their favorite series with this abrupt ending. What a total mess.
 
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...oks-to-outsource-final-walking-dead-chapters/

After Friday's surprise announcement that more than 90 percent of Telltale's staff had been let go, the company now says it is talking to "potential partners" that could help complete the current, final season of The Walking Dead.

Part two of the planned four-part episodic adventure game series launched today, and the season was previously set to conclude on December 18. But Telltale confirmed in a tweeted statement last night that it is "actively working on a solution that will allow episodes 3 and 4 to be completed and released in some form." To that end, the company says that "multiple potential partners have stepped forward to express interest in helping to see The Final Season through to completion."

While 25 of Telltale's 275 employees are being retained by the company for now, Netflix indicated in a statement that skeleton staff will be finishing up work on Minecraft: Story Mode, which is "moving forward as planned." Negotiations between Netflix and Telltale for a potential Stranger Things episodic game are now out the window, though, and Netflix says it will be "evaluating other options for bringing the Stranger Things universe to life in an interactive medium."

Variety reports that the third episode of The Walking Dead's final season is "extremely close to finished," while the fourth is still in "very rough" shape. That report also goes into detail on Telltale employees' optimism about the season earlier this week, before a needed round of funding unexpectedly fell through.

“There is such a responsibility that comes with this now that we are synonymous with ‘The Walking Dead’ comic," designer Mark Darin told Variety. "We have a responsibility to the fans and to the world in which ‘The Walking Dead’ lives.”
 
No severance.... Thats cold as fuck, that studio was damn near printing money 2-3 years ago. The fact that they are leaving the staff with nothing shows just how piss poor their management and foresight is/was....

It's always quality over quantity. There's no way they could've maintained that standard of games across all those titles without a realistic increase of staff and $$. They did neither and here they are....

Sadly the top always takes care of themselves... Those mfkrs got plenty bank and left their staff out to dry.
 
fonzerrillii said:
Actually kind of shocked that Microsoft didn’t step in on this on since telltale is involved in the Minecraft story shit
Click to expand...
Netflix owns the rights to that Minecraft series and they said it wont be affected. I always thougth telltale games were overated, they get hyped on the internet but i don't know anyone who actually bought it or played them.
 

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