Telltale Games Hit With Major Layoffs As Part of a 'Majority Studio Closure' (theverge.com)

Telltale Games, the video game developer behind The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Batman: The Enemy Within, laid off a large number of its staff today. According to The Verge, "the company will retain a small team of 25." From the report: "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 remaining employees will stay on "to fulfill the company's obligations to its board and partners," according to Telltale. 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." 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.

Comments

Very Sad

[SuperKendall]

I was *really* looking forward to the second season of The Wolf Among Us. It seemed like they were doing so well...

I wonder if they ended up squandering a lot of money chasing big names, licenses to use properties like The Walking Dead and Stranger Things can't have come cheap. Maybe they burned up too much capital on those without getting the traction they needed from sales.

I thought they always did an excellent job with story and gameplay in the stuff I played from them, so I hope all those laid off can find other work they like.

They'll remember that

[DrXym]

Or rather it'll lead to an inconsequential cutscene or line of dialogue.

Re:They'll remember that

[Raenex]

AI isn't needed, just more writing animating and voice acting.

They did, to some extent. They had a few choices that had deep impact, like in Game of Thrones, the last act of the game was split in two, depending on which main character you chose to sacrifice. And there were smaller touches here and there reflected your choices. And each dialog prompt got a different response, depending on what you chose.

But it would have been impossibly expensive to have every choice matter in a deeply satisfying way. You'd need an exponential tree of crafted responses.

Sadly this was expected

[Luckyo]

Telltale games were very new and fresh when first walking dead came out. They looked like you had a huge amount of impact on the story by acting in certain ways at certain points, which was reinforced with many psychological tricks.

Problem is, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me". Once you tried to replay these games for a few times, you understood the underlying mechanisms tricking you into thinking that you had an impact when you really didn't have all that much. So the next game, you came armed with this knowledge, reducing the enjoyment. And this effect cumulated rapidly.

So it was inevitable that eventually most people who were in the target audience got mighty bored of essentially being constantly tricked into thinking that their actions matter when they really don't. And so, sales tanked. They had a good run though, and I think most of us still remember the first walking dead with some degree of warmth, as is the case with the wolf among us.

The final nail in the coffin was the blatant cash grabs with new episodes that were clearly just there to cash in. I guess that killed whatever was left of any good will from the customers.

30 minutes?

[commodore64_love]

I have so much food, drinks, and spare shoes/suits in my desk, being out of the building in 30 minutes would be impossible. Why did this management team have to be such dicks? (When I was laid-off from Lockheed, they gave us from 8 am to 5pm... basically all day... to clear-out our stuff.)

Re:30 minutes?

[Dutch Gun]

It doesn't have to be that way, but that's probably just more indications of poor management.

When I was laid off at a game company I worked for many years ago, one morning the company was split into two meetings, the folks being laid off, and everyone else, although we obviously only found this out at the meeting. The CEO came in to talk to us personally, was very straight with us about what was happening and why, and took time to answer all our questions. We were given the time we needed to clear things out, and there wasn't anyone hovering over us. We shook hands with our former bosses and co-workers as we left, and that was that.

Afterwards, another laid-off co-worker and I joked that "it was the nicest firing ever." There was little danger of us doing anything untoward, because when people are treated with respect and dignity, they're likely to respond in kind, even in a bad situation. And as a more practical matter, we wanted good references from our employer, and hoped to remain working in the game industry. That wouldn't be likely to happen if someone pulled any particularly malicious stunts, as it's a relatively small industry - and was smaller still back then.

Re:Fortune teller

[Riceballsan]

well neither are relevant to their product. telltale games selling points isn't anything remotely close to technical advancement. They are barely more than chose your own adventure books with a couple of "press this button really rapidly" or "press this button at the right time, reaction tests" thrown in for good measure. If their goal is to keep making products that their fans like, artists and writers are what they need to keep.

This wasn't entirely obvious a few years ago?

[LostMyBeaver]

Telltale had great games like Sam and Max which were amazing story lines and designed from the very beginning to be played as games. They were AWESOME!

Then Telltale pulled a Lego... by that, I mean that they decided to forfeit their revenue to other companies which had nothing to offer besides branding.

Consider that a movie is a movie... movies are not choose your own adventure story telling systems. They are written in a linear fashion and the result was that Telltale was doing little more than producing movies with "click next to continue" for other peoples stories.

I believe the Telltale had a great format before they started wasting all their money on trying to be a movie studio instead of a game studio. Extended cut scenes were pissing me off and I couldn't bring myself to waste my time playing more than a few minutes of a game... which wasn't a game so much as a "Watch the really long cut scene and then click 5 things and watch another cut scene" format.

I sincerely hope that Telltale manages to go back to basics and stops wasting time and money on making this crappy format. There is a place in this world for fun to play adventure games. They had it... they lost it. Time to scrub the schools to find talented script writers who love the format and then mock them up and perform some market research. As Telltell has proven, it's possible to make short episodes on a schedule. If they make a good story, they could instead start with a game and then get someone like Netflix to buy the rights to the story instead.