I remember there was talk of them developing a completely new engine to use for future games and a lot of people were quite excited by the prospect of Telltale games with a new, modern engine to bring performance up to modern console standards.
I always wondered what they might have been like with something wholly original rather than using licensed stuff, they clearly had some great writers and it would've been nice to see what they could've come up with if they'd been completely let off the leash to do whatever they wanted.
That's gotta hurt, waiting so long to get resolution on the Walking Dead, only to find resources that could've gone into polishing it off going instead to strawberry floating Minecraft.
I had issues with them and their games but... wow. Never expected them to be shut down. How the strawberry float does this happen when TWD was so huge?! One too many commercial tie-ins and not enough of giving fans what they want? (i.e. Wolf 2, quicker turnaround on TWD and a better engine.)
Seven wrote:Gonna have to wonder what happens to people who has already paid for fourth season.
I may ask for a part refund on Xbox chat, they're normally pretty good with stuff like that. Obviously if Telltale have gone bust they're not obliged to give anything, but it would be set a dangerous precedent for season passes and episodic games in the future if TWD goes unfinished.
It's sad, but they didn't really help themselves. I haven't bought a Telltale game (or any episodic game, really) in ages since they're usually on Games with Gold/PS+ a few months after launch.
I never understood why they kept going for bigger and bigger licenses, either. Surely the money they'd spend securing the license would outweigh what they'd make back? The Sam and Max games are still their best work
When mad catz folded we didn't get any redundancy pay, we just got walked in to a room with two women from a bank, who handed us letters saying it had gone into liquidation, becuae of which we wouldnt be getting anything, then we were walked out of the building and that was that. Its strawberry floating cold and not at all like you'd imagine. Luckily UK law means the government will give you a (shifty capped) redundancy sum if you've not been given any notice. I think I got the equivalent of half a month's pay.
Edit: oh and when the US teams got let go a few months before, there was no warning at all, they came to work and one by one were given a cardboard box to clear their desk and escorted out. Brutal.
I just logged in to download the games I owned with them (Tales of Monkey Island, Sam and Max Seasons 1-3) since I don't want to lose them. They were all really fun. I stopped following them once they stopped doing the series I liked.
From looking through some of the ResetEra threads, seems like their location was part of the problem when it came to losing money.
They were basically in the hear of Silicon Valley in an absolutely huge office, so were paying an absolute fortune just for the space, plus paying silicon valley level wages to a hugely overstaffed team. From what I gather most games besides TWD Season 1 weren't hugely successful. Had they been working with a smaller team in a cheaper location the level of sales would have been more than enough to sustain them it seems.
Basically, poor leadership from the very top is the primary cause of the problems.
Fortunately there are also tweets like this going around out there,
So with a bit of luck the people who've been disgracefully cut off will manage to land on their feet. I know we complain about some worker rights in the UK, but at least we have legal guarantees of some kind of redundancy payments, and being a contractor doesn't make you ineligible for Unemployment benefits like it does in the US.