The Gaming Den

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/327085/T ... losure.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoZzUpuP31c

Jesus, I knew the legal issues with Bruner and the other COs was a thing but Christ, whodda' thunk it woudda' taken out the company?

Did they rapidly expand their number of employees after their first big hit?

30 minutes? Awesome employer. "Hope you don't need the money to feed your families, now get the fuck out."

I believe what also happened is most 'fans' watched youtube videos instead of buying the game, so the tubers made money and the company not so much

More like they did manage to make a few good games, but then wasted their money making a lot of meh/bad games of big franchises.

Whatever happened, it got worse over time:

My guess would be that after your first couple of TellTale games, you catch onto the one trick TellTale relies on way too much:



The Walking Dead was fantastic the first time, but if you play it again to make different choices it becomes very obvious very quickly that almost none of your choices have any effect on gameplay at all. For all the "Clementine will remember that," it doesn't actually make a goddamn difference whose life you save or why. The zombie defense bait and switch towards the end sort of sums it all up perfectly: Everyone tells you how many bullets they have left, you get to choose which people you want covering what entrances, then haha just kidding the zombies get in before you can even get into position and none of your choices matter. Watching on YouTube is the superior version because the cut scenes are well acted and all, but the gameplay is an illusion that will only frustrate you if you think it will have any impact on how the story actually turns out. When you make a choice and get a result you didn't want, you only "chose wrong" in the sense that the designer wanted you to make the other choice and will railroad you down that path.

Linear narrative adventure games aren't exactly a Telltale invention, and I don't think being deceptive about narrative complexity has ever sunk any other game ever.

Note that Game of Thrones is simultaneously their first critical stumble (in the post Walking Dead era) and their last game to crack 500,000.

Note the time between games:
11 months
5 months
18 months
2 months
11 months
1 month <- This is Game of Thrones releasing.
10 months
4 months
6 months
4 months
4 months
3 months
1 month

So, takeaway: Telltale games was a small two-team studio running two projects at a time. Can't tell you how 'flexible' the boundaries of those teams were, but it definitely looks like there were two of them. They hit it big with Walking Dead, then followed it up with Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead S2. They think they've made it, that this is their new normal, so they expand, hire a C-team, maybe even a D-team, and snatch up a bunch of licensing deals to make games with. But it turns out freakishly big hits are freakishly big hits, not every game you release is going to be like that, and even with positive critical reception their sales are still levelling off. Then to make things worse the B-team stumbles on Game of Thrones a year before C/D-teams ship, it's not critically well-received, and then it's not just a problem of having clearly overestimated the market for their product it's also that there are now cracks in the brand and the fuckin' C/D-teams you hired to churn out whatever licensed shit you could get your hands on sure as hell aren't going to make those cracks any better.

The moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is they should have remembered that they were the same people who made Back to the Future and Jurassic Park, and cultivated the brand they'd built instead of scrambling to flood their own market on the mistaken premise that everyone would buy everything they released forever and ever.

DSMatticus wrote:The moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is they should have remembered that they were the same people who made Back to the Future and Jurassic Park

They weren't even the same people who made The Walking Dead. Those two left to make Firewatch.

Both Wolf Among Us (the other team) and Walking Dead S2 (post-Vanaman/Rodkin) were still well received - the sad thing is Telltale probably had a deep enough pool of talent to just keep on keepin' on if they'd understood their market position. But they didn't, so it looks like they decided to chop up their core talent to create 1-2 extra teams, fill in the gaps with fresh blood, and increase the studio's output "because we found a license to print money, woo!" - and they fucking imploded, because they weren't actually an untapped market of infinite potential, they were just a trusted brand with solid core talent. Seriously, compare the Game of Thrones credits to any of the four games from their 'peak.' You can see the shuffles, and you can see that they didn't work.

Then Ubisoft bought up Herman, Lenart, and Shorette in 2017 and that was it. I assume those three saw the writing on the wall and bailed while the bailing was good.

DSMatticus wrote:Linear narrative adventure games aren't exactly a Telltale invention, and I don't think being deceptive about narrative complexity has ever sunk any other game ever.

Having a linear narrative is fine. We're all used to games where your conversation choices are just personal roleplay and don't actually affect the outcome. But traditionally, that system is simply the exposition between segments of otherwise engaging gameplay: be it platforming, point and click puzzles, whatever.

In a Telltale game, the conversation branches are literally the only interactivity you have, and if you play any of their games twice you realize it's a farce. You're not playing a game, you're reading a book. I like books, but I'm not willing to pay sixty bucks for the crap they're printing.

The hardest part is to say "the people who made decisions about these shitass games deserve to be unemployed forever, and used as examples of the worst excesses of the gaming industry" and also "the people who helped make these games knowing they were literally the worst games they could make without working for EA deserve to be treated like human beings."

There were probably some people who did a good job there, just 200% not people who decided how the games should work, and also we need to bring back the stocks for whoever decided to make all of their games "like X, but a completely linear shitty story that you can't do anything with."