The Wolf Among Us - Telltale's Fables-based game

Brutal. For a lot of reasons.

Hopefully other companies fill the vacuum and keep making the same kind of games. Maybe it's more sustainable without all the big name licenses that were (Game of Thrones, Jurassic Park) hit-and-miss.

Kinda weird how a company that seemed to occupy so much space on store fronts and news sites apparently didn't make any money. I mean, how does that even happen? It's not as is the games were the most technologically advanced stuff either.

Sliders, Flame of Recca, Medaka Box, Haruhi Suzumiya, the Blade film series, Dredd, Sense 8, infamous, Prototype 2, Metal Gear Rising 2, Maverick Hunter, Afro Samurai 2, Star Wars Battlefront 3, Sonic Chronicles 2, Spectacular Spiderman, Gargoyles, Half-Life 3, Heroes Reborn, the DCEU, Tron Legacy, Terminator Genisys. Now this.

This is becoming the story of my life.

I just started really getting into these Telltale Games like 4-6 months ago - Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands - and now they're shutting down. What happens to The Walking Dead Final Season then? Did they finish all of the episodes, are we getting a crappy cliffhanger, or are we going to be playing a truncated version scrapped together by this 25-person staff.

I thought the Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Walking Dead titles were financial successes, if not critical ones.

Edited by Soble on Sep 21st 2018 at 3:35:37 AM

This guy's video makes a lot of sense now.

Well, that makes the reports that their current CEO's the absolute worst seem pretty credible.

I don't think they were failures, but I don't think they were big, big successes that let the company breathe easy, either. These are major properties that were probably expecting original-Walking Dead-sized returns, and I don't know that Telltale has had that since. Certainly it doesn't seem like many people played the games that I considered their personal best (Tales From The Borderlands, anyone?).

I think they just ran out of time to find financing for their next big project, and I wouldn't be surprised if the new Walking Dead wasn't quite the shot in the arm they needed (because who's really into The Walking Dead anymore?). TBAU seems like more of a labour of love than a big license they could rely on to keep making the kind of games they've been making lately.

I thought Bruner was the guy who sucked? I hadn't heard much about the guy who replaced him.

Edited by Unsung on Sep 21st 2018 at 6:23:47 AM

I've read that the Got G and Batman titles had some fairly weak sales. Honestly, I'm not terribly surprised. Certain franchises are a perfect fit for the Telltale style, but something like Batman has titles that in all likelihood scratch the itch of fans far more than a point and click episodic series does. That's not to say the games were bad, but they never got anywhere close to Arkham Series level hype, and I can't imagine its an IP that comes cheap.

Man, I hope Borderlands 3 follows up on some of the Tales from the Borderlands stuff. TWAU and TFTB were Telltale’s legitimately great games.

You are indeed right, I seemed to have misread.

So the simplicity of the cause is the opposite I implied, then.

Damn. I really hope all these people end up finding jobs somewhere - from what I heard they didn't even get severance. Which is the absolute shit thing about this: a fuckton of people are out of ways to care for themselves.

Edited by SilentColossus on Sep 22nd 2018 at 11:34:30 AM

A chart of Steam sales for all of Telltales games◊

It's pretty easy to see why they went bankrupt now. Too many high profile IPs that weren't making them back the money they spent developing games about them.

I'm guessing the TWAU 2 was probably a saving throw. People had been begging for years for it and, if you've got nothing left, it could be the answer. But it came too late. I hear WD 4 changed up a lot of Telltale's problems by having actual over the shoulder camera and combat among other things.

Was Got G any good? I'd wanted to play it but never had the time or money in college to get it.

In my opinion it started off badly but consistently got better each episode until it reached a satisfying conclusion.

Guardians is okay. Its plot is rather forgettable and its humor never really landed for me, but its character writing was fantastic and the game made me tear up more than a few times.

Edited by lrrose on Sep 22nd 2018 at 2:52:41 PM

Plus shalalalala.

Wow. Their last titles didn't even hit 500,000 sales. I genuinely feel sorry for the guys, their games weren't my type but I definitely enjoyed the stories they wrote.

Come to think of it... that might've been a major reason why their business model failed. You could essentially experience a Telltale Game via letsplays on Youtube or Twitch and not only get the entire story, but hardly miss out on anything major, unless you're one of the sorts where personal interaction is a crucial aspect to enjoyment. Heck, that's exactly what I did for the Batman: Enemy Within games - I just watched most of the gameplay online, since it consisted of interactive cutscenes or QT Es.

Should they have cracked down on You Tube or Twitch playthroughs?

Perhaps. I mean, it's true, there's very little reason to play through most of these titles yourself. I guess they'd have about the same right to crack down on streaming and youtube as any television show.

Edited by Kayeka on Sep 22nd 2018 at 9:03:26 PM

> Should they have cracked down on You Tube or Twitch playthroughs?

Had they started doing that their death would have been much sooner with less teared shed,it was what killed them was making crappy games based off movie and tv shows

Youtube and Twitch are the least of their issue. Their issue was volume. Releasing countless properties, too much for their audience to really follow. Too much for quality to be taken into account, or for them advance or refine their genre and fix their shitty engine. The quantity and engine issues also probably didn't help in that most of their game employed an almost identical art style, that further blends the games into "More of the same".

They didn't develop the properties they already had beyond the Walking Dead which... died after Season 2 pretty much. Game of Thrones ends on a sequel hook out of nowhere that seemingly never went into development. Tales from the Borderlands was a load of fun. TWAU was good, but probably could stand on its own.

Instead of buying so many big properties, they should have developed them out and then done another big project. They could have done fine that way. But they pushed too much out at once without really understanding what people liked about some of those. Game of Thrones went full 'EDGY EVERYONE DIES' without understanding how the books and (occasionally) the show maintain audience interest in face of such darkness.

I never played Game of Thrones, Minecraft, or Jurassic Park, and I couldn't get into Back to the Future.

The solution Bruner had to the failure of any given property always seemed to be to try and find the next big thing, but the next big thing never really came, in part because they were always scrambling to get their previous projects out the door. The episodic model ultimately turned against them as well, as their games got bigger. Rather than a try-before-you-buy approach that encouraged people to consume the games in bite-sized chunks as Telltale was developing them, it became a case where you gambled on a whole season at a time, and many people, having been burned in the past, weren't willing to take that risk after a point.

Edited by Unsung on Sep 22nd 2018 at 7:36:36 AM

God-damn.

TWAU Season 2, No More Heroes 3, Kingdom Hearts 3, Life is Strange 2 - the list of games I'd have shelled out for in a heartbeat is short.

Now all I can do is speculate.

Apparently Telltale was forced to pull the plug on itself after a "potential financial backer" suddenly walked out on them.

Supposedly this last potential financial backer was Lionsgate Entertainment, who was said to have recently backed out a newly proposed financing deal in order to financially prioritize movies.

Um...dick move, Lionsgate?

Not really. They shouldn't have been so mismanaged to be dependent on future projects to be able to afford their own project.

Lionsgate didn't make Telltale flood their own market niche with nigh-identical interchangeable games. Lionsgate didn't make Telltale refuse to innovate on their formula. Lionsgate didn't make Telltale stick to their crippled engine. Lionsgate didn't make Telltale run a toxic work environment with insane work hours with no paid OT and then fire its employees with no severance and no warning.

If anything, based on the employee testimonies that have come out in the last few days, Lionsgate were the smart ones to GTFO and sever ties with what was clearly a sinking ship. Heck, Lionsgate had already put 40 million in Telltale.

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 25th 2018 at 10:09:10 AM