Following yesterday’s initial reports that Telltale Games had been successfully shutting down, the studio behind licensed story ’em ups together with The Walking Dead and Batman: The Enemy Within have confirmed the unhealthy information. All however 25 Telltale workers have been let go (that’s 250-ish individuals gone, former members report), reduce all the way down to a skeleton crew to “fulfil the company’s obligations to its board and partners.” The studio say they’ve had “a year marked by insurmountable challenges.” Telltale haven’t but confirmed fairly what’s going to occur to their previous, current, and future games, saying they’ll discuss their portfolio “in the coming weeks”, however I wouldn’t anticipate rather more from them. What a sorry mess.
“It’s been an incredibly difficult year for Telltale as we worked to set the company on a new course. Unfortunately, we ran out of time trying to get there,” CEO Pete Hawley stated in Telltale’s official statement final night time.
“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.”
Except after all they’re not mates who’re leaving, they’re workers who’re shedding their jobs. And, some report, they’re not getting severance pay and have just one week of healthcare left. For individuals dwelling spherical San Francisco–an obscenely expressive metropolis–and beneath America’s terrible and dear healthcare system, that’s no good. Unsurprisingly, this has sparked but extra calls to unionise the games industry.
What particularly sucks is how sudden this appears to have been for workers, and a few reportedly joined the corporate solely this week. As now-former Telltale narrative designer Emily Grace Buck claimed:
Which… rattling.
Folks throughout the trade try to attach Telltalers with attainable new jobs under Twitter’s #TelltaleJobs tag. Mitch Dyer and Simply Undrea are helpfully amassing these in a document too. Best of luck, everybody.
What will occur with Telltale’s games? The second episode of The Walking Dead: The Final Season continues to be on account of launch on Tuesday, so far as anybody is aware of. Buck (who has made clear that she’s not an organization consultant, only a former worker) said that episodes three and 4 of The Final Season haven’t been completed and their groups had been amongst these laid off. She additional claimed that the upcoming Wolf Among Us 2 and Stranger Things sequence are cancelled. A supply talking anonymously to USGamer did additionally say Wolfamongus 2 and Strangerings had been cancelled, however claimed that Telltale are nonetheless engaged on their Minecraft: Story Mode interactive TV doodad for Netflix. To be clear: none of that’s formally confirmed; formally, it’s all nonetheless up within the air.
Given how small Telltale are actually, and what number of of these 25 individuals are seemingly administrative employees wrapping the corporate up, yeah, in all probability don’t anticipate a lot from them.
Telltale have clearly been in bother for some time. The firm laid off 90 employees in November 2017, which was then a couple of quarter of the employees. And experiences have painted an image of an organization with bad management and irritating working circumstances. They’ve nabbed some mighty massive licences however, as Hawley stated, apparently they haven’t translated to sufficiently big gross sales figures.
It’s all a disgrace. Telltale constructed a slick fashion of storytelling which continues to be vastly influential throughout all kinds of games. They’ve made some cracking games too, with The Walking Dead’s first season and Wolfamongus amongst their best to me, and hell, they even managed to make Borderlands funny. Ah certain they’ve had some stinkers, however so it goes. And their workers definitely don’t deserve this. They completed good, and RPS will keep in mind that.
