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Telltale Games Closure



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Max

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Antifa Lockhart

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It didn't really come out of nowhere. The company downsized by 25%, rumors have been circulating for years about the poor management and they've been burning through new IP licenses without recouping losses.

They weren't well.
 

Megavoltage

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I really really really wanted The Wolf Among Us season 2. Now it's gone forever...
 

Zen

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They made a string of mediocre games, didn't experiment with the genre at all -- just opting to making the same game hoping to ape their biggest success -- and after TWD S1 expanded way too much, way too quickly. They went from what 40 to 300+ employees? Not a smart move at all. If they had kept up the success, and made bank with every game afterwards, it would've been justified, but they got too cocky. I'm sure it didn't help that some (2 I think) writers left after S1 of TWD and probably explains why there was a drop in quality.

Also, last I heard the remaining staff is going to be working on the Minecraft game, not the last season of TWD.
 

Max

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It didn't really come out of nowhere. The company downsized by 25%, rumors have been circulating for years about the poor management and they've been burning through new IP licenses without recouping losses.

They weren't well.

Well, perhaps it just seemed out of nowhere to me then. I hadn't heard about all of these other issues and it felt like a really fast thing that happened when 250 people were let go just like that. I mean, I get it, if finances are bad finances are bad, just the way they'd been pumping out big name titles like Minecraft, Batman, and especially The Walking Dead (and then even having announced some more titles recently), I didn't suspect things were THAT bad.

I really really really wanted The Wolf Among Us season 2. Now it's gone forever...

Yeah, same. This was what I was looking forward to most. Although after Borderlands their games started to feel way more mediocre, so maybe it's for the best we don't have to see what would have been.

As far as the final season of The Walking Dead, they recently released a statement that others had reached out to them about potentially helping them to see the game through to the end. So who knows. As their most popular series and the one that put them on the map though, it would be a shame for it to get canned midway through it's final season, so close to finally being completely done.
 
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Sora2016

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Its honestly always crap when a company cuts off a game like this, that still had updates and such currently being made. Didn't people pay for the whole season?? They have to address that in some way otherwise its just...so bad. I feel like this will affect season based games in general if people don't get their finished product or their money back. Though, maybe that isn't an inherently bad thing to affect?

As for the company itself, I didn't really keep up with it to know about how garbage it treats its employees till now, but I honestly wasn't surprised when it was revealed they weren't making enough money. It really felt like they oversaturated the market with games that were all too similar. I played a few of them, but I didn't really want to play all that they were releasing that quickly. Also, now I'm honestly even more jaded that I evened played them at all since they always end on crappy cliffhangers so they could maybe just pick them up one day if they felt like it. And, well now thats not happening lol.
 

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I'm sorry for the Walking Dead fans, but I honestly won't miss them much. I played The Wolf among us, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead Season 2 and neither of the games impressed me very much. I like that TWAU introduced me to Fables, which seems to be great (only read Volume 1 so far) but the lack of any meaningful choices except for "who of these two people will you let die?" which always seemed kinda inevitable to me, the crappy engine (sometimes I would go Game Over because the game demanded to press a button before the scene had even loaded) and the interesting, but (to me) rather mediocre artstyle lost my interest quickly. I don't mind when games leave the option to make a sequel but it's absolutely horrible to give you just half a game that ends on several open strings to say "to be continued" - if you are not absolutely sure that you will make a sequel (and even then it's kinda questionable) I don't want games to leave you at a point where you actually don't really have an ending (like GoT) and you never get one because they won't make one. Or won't tell you when and if ever and instead go buying more and more IPs to throw the same formula onto it again and again. It's sad for the employees though.
 

Max

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I'm sorry for the Walking Dead fans, but I honestly won't miss them much. I played The Wolf among us, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead Season 2 and neither of the games impressed me very much. I like that TWAU introduced me to Fables, which seems to be great (only read Volume 1 so far) but the lack of any meaningful choices except for "who of these two people will you let die?" which always seemed kinda inevitable to me, the crappy engine (sometimes I would go Game Over because the game demanded to press a button before the scene had even loaded) and the interesting, but (to me) rather mediocre artstyle lost my interest quickly. I don't mind when games leave the option to make a sequel but it's absolutely horrible to give you just half a game that ends on several open strings to say "to be continued" - if you are not absolutely sure that you will make a sequel (and even then it's kinda questionable) I don't want games to leave you at a point where you actually don't really have an ending (like GoT) and you never get one because they won't make one. Or won't tell you when and if ever and instead go buying more and more IPs to throw the same formula onto it again and again. It's sad for the employees though.

This was always my biggest gripe with Telltale, they were so good (as in not good) at ending games on cliffhangers whether they needed to or not.

Tales From Monkey Island: Cliffhanger. Will this series ever see a proper conclusion? Probably not. Thanks for continuing the trend then ditching it, Telltale.

Back to the Future: Cliffhanger (kind of). Due to the light-hearted nature of it, it was definitely open for a sequel without needing to be the way they ended it. Could have come off as more to come, or just as the idea that Doc and Marty's adventures would always continue.

The Wolf Among Us: Another cliffhanger that felt more stylistic than anything. Did we NEED more, no. But I was always left with a feeling like I needed more to be wholly satisfied after the big revelation finally hits at the end and it cuts to black. An announcement of a sequel after so many years made me jump for joy, but not anymore (I know I know, there's always Fables. But I wanted more of this particular story thread).

Game of Thrones: HUGE-ASS CLIFFHANGER. Pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that they wanted to have multiple seasons of the game spanning multiple seasons of the show. They were for sure planning on making more of this, but what the hell ever happened to it? It's like they decided to put it on hold while they pumped out 8 other different things instead of just finishing what they'd started.

Tales From the Borderlands: Cliffhanger (kind of). What were the fates of our protagonists? Do we really need a sequel? No. Was the cliffhanger necessary? Also no. I would have loved for them to have dropped the previously mentioned "stylistic" choice of cliffhanger and just start ending solid stories conclusively. This game could have had no cliffhanger at all and they still could have made a sequel someday if they wanted to. Instead we're left wondering the fates of the two main characters with no sequel in sight ever, unless you want to hope they show up in Borderlands 3 if that ever actually happens. But even then, I'm not a big fan of the ACTUAL Borderlands games.

Minecraft Story Mode had a definitive ending in Episode 4. So what's episode 5, an epilogue? Kind of. An epilogue that leaves you on a cliffhanger that can only be resolved if you buy all the dlc episodes. Congratulations season pass holders, you have to spend more money for a complete story now.

And then The Walking Dead New Frontier ended with an in your face message telling you Clementine's story would continue after it was left unresolved in this game. And it did continue, but will it actually end? Now we have to wait and see.

Screw the cliffhanger trend Telltale Games was following. THIS is why I didn't expect it to be as bad as it turned out to be, so many projects were set up for so much more and it was like, how could someone do that if they had any idea they may not be able to get to all of it?
 

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This was always my biggest gripe with Telltale, they were so good (as in not good) at ending games on cliffhangers whether they needed to or not.

...

Screw the cliffhanger trend Telltale Games was following. THIS is why I didn't expect it to be as bad as it turned out to be, so many projects were set up for so much more and it was like, how could someone do that if they had any idea they may not be able to get to all of it?

Absolutely yes. I mean, we're in 2018, it's not like back in the 90s / early 2000 where you couldn't know whether a game was good or had a decent ending and you went in blind and bought it, nowadays we have review sites and Internet and can learn in advance whether a story has significant choices or a good ending and this is why Cliffhangers don't work that well anymore. If I get to know in advance (and I will look for information beforehand when I know it's a Telltale game) that a game has poor choices and no real ending and there's no sequel in sight because they keep buying new properties and never make a statement about older ones, I won't buy the game and there's a lot of gamers like me out there. It's one thing if an ending is controversial and there are people who like it and there are people who don't, then I can play for myself to decide what the whole fuss is about but knowing that I will play through five episodes with rising tension to get nowhere in the end convinces me in no way to buy the game or recommend other people buying it. And with their lack of actual choices, they didn't have that much core fanbase to rely on permanently, at least not before TWD, so new people are not really inclined to dive into the Telltale because there isn't much to dive in. While I don't mind the concept of seasons in general, I'm not really a fan of people telling you "oh, the first [3] seasons are kinda mediocre, but season 4 is good and season 5 is great, so you just have to sit through it" ... well, I don't want to watch 3 whole seasons to get to the juicy part, it's just not satisfying to me. If they really had a plan for several seasons, I'm not even sure whether I would've stayed for the whole time because the Telltale games I played also always felt kinda similar to me with that dark, brooding, everything will inevitably go down eventually atmosphere that I kinda got tired of after the usual rain of bad stuff that happened around episode 3 or 4.
 

Alpha Baymax

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This is sad news (especially for those laid off(, I'm playing Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series, and I'm enjoying the game so much. It's a shame that a larger video game company didn't buy them out to keep them afloat.
 
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