A Telltale Meltdown
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In what is apparently a classic tale of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Telltale Games went into shutdown mode today. There's a skeleton crew left to finish up Walking Dead and/or their Minecraft obligation with Netflix (reports vary) and after that they're gone.
Telltale Games begins wave of layoffs, cancels Stranger Things game [Updated]
![Telltale Games begins wave of layoffs, cancels Stranger Things game [Updated]](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/unnamed-760x380.jpg)
"Telltale Games made the difficult decision to begin a majority studio closure."
I haven't played any of their adventure/visual novel games since they entered the Walking Dead era, though I apparently own Wolf Among Us. I enjoyed the Sam & Max, Monkey Island, Strong Bad, and Back to the Future ones, though.
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@Parody I did always wonder how what they did was profitable. They put an astronomical amount of effort into games that not a lot of people are interested in.
By the way, I would highly recommend Tales from the Borderlands if you haven't played it. I keep finding myself disappointed with Telltale games (except for the Guardians of the Galaxy one I'm playing right now) because I played TFTB first and that's what got me interested in Telltale but none of the others I played came close to how fun it was.
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Eh, I don't see any victory they could have had. Seems to me yet another case of manglement, likely several thick layers of it. Ok, drawing all that stuff takes time and effort, but I could never have imagined that it was >250 people there. That's the number you might see on AAA projects where there are huge levels crammed with detail, thousands of 3D models, tens of thousands of textures, metric tons of code and QA testing, with sales projections and budgets set accordingly. Seeking to ride the gravy train by banking on the Wanking Dead and stuff popular at the moment (GoT, Batman and that Marvel thing), and cranking the Gutenberg's press of semi-interactive comic books apparently wasn't such a good idea. Also, folks that were instrumental to Telltale's success formed Campo Santo (that made Firewatch and ended up being
eatenacquired by Gaben). Perhaps because they wanted to have original IP rather than to churn out official Marvel/DC fanfiction.
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@pie_flavor TFTB is definitely my favorite. In addition to the great script, I was always impressed by how well they managed to match the style of the parent games, down to the menu system. It seemed to be pretty clearly a labor of love.
If you want “fun”, then yeah, I can see how you might be disappointed - most of their other titles have been more dramatic than comedic. (Although I can’t imagine anybody expecting otherwise from The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, or Batman! Guardians is the only other one where a humorous tone would fit.)
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in A Telltale Meltdown:
Ok, drawing all that stuff takes time and effort, but I could never have imagined that it was >250 people there. That's the number you might see on AAA projects where there are huge levels crammed with detail, thousands of 3D models, tens of thousands of textures, metric tons of code and QA testing, with sales projections and budgets set accordingly.
It wasn't 250 people per game, though. They were cranking out 3-4 per year for the last couple of years.
Also, folks that were instrumental to Telltale's success formed Campo Santo (that made Firewatch and ended up being
eatenacquired by Gaben). Perhaps because they wanted to have original IP rather than to churn out official Marvel/DC fanfiction.My impression from interviews is that it was mostly internal politics (especially the CEO's appropriating credit for their work) that drove them out.
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Hmm. Seeing that the format and the tech side of it hadn't really changed for years (and was still having bugs, I hear) it must have been mostly artists being overworked to death, C-suites getting fat and little else. Which is actually worse. Instead of proper planning they gobbled up contracts, went on a hiring spree (and contracting; I see number 400 popping up now), mandated horrible crunch, and proceeded to crank out episode after another of things popular with kids (but the point-and-click format itself, as @pie already mentions, actually having a niche audience).
I get that you folks enjoyed some of the games. That's fine. And too bad that all those people were let go. But it wasn't meant to last. I wonder how many of them had predicted the outcome themselves and just feared for when exactly the hammer will strike. We all know that vidja gaems, especially SP story-based ones, is tough business at best. But no company just shuts down like that. C-suites and those having access to the numbers must have known about it for a long time, and kept on hoping that some of contractors like Netflix would bail them out by funding yet another thing or some large publisher corp would make an offer. And it caught up to them.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in A Telltale Meltdown:
Also, folks that were instrumental to Telltale's success formed Campo Santo (that made Firewatch
Wow really?
Firewatch was complete garbage. I now feel better about owning no Telltale games.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in A Telltale Meltdown:
But no sane company just shuts down like that.
FTFY. The key problem is that many senior managers just can't bring themselves to keep spending under control (relative to income) resulting in objectively insane decisions from the perspective of the company.
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I was more concerned about this when I got confused and thought you meant Travellers Tales.
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@loopback0 I can see how it would be easy to confuse one company pumping out 2-4 licensed titles per annum initialed TTG with another pumping out 2-4 licensed titles per annum initialed TTG.
Traveler's Tales's products, while not perfect, do seem to have higher quality workmanship than Telltale's did. Hopefully they're better at managing their business. (Seeing as how they killed year 3 of LEGO Dimensions, despite my love for it, they seem to have that side of things in hand. Compare to Telltale who greenlit a second season of Batman despite the first apparently tanking.)
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in A Telltale Meltdown:
Traveler's Tales's products, while not perfect, do seem to have higher quality workmanship than Telltale's did.
One of the guys from Traveler's Tales (maybe the head guy, IDK) has a Youtube channel showcasing prototype versions of their games and some of the clever programming tricks they used to do cool stuff on early consoles.
Fake edit: Here is the channel
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@Unperverted-Vixen I'm sure LEGO Dimensions was great fun to play, but holy shit was it a cash grab. You could do almost nothing with it without buying set after set after set. I can't wait until cemu gets peripheral support for the portal so I can play it as it was meant to be played without dropping $200 on a game worth $40.
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always great to see people starting posts with "hundreds of people lost their jobs with no severance pay, BUT"
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@ben_lubar Where did you get the idea there wasn't severance pay?
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@pie_flavor said in A Telltale Meltdown:
@ben_lubar Where did you get the idea there wasn't severance pay?
I dunno, maybe from people saying there wasn't severance pay?
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@ben_lubar The Verge article they linked said that everyone was paid severance in the first round.
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@pie_flavor They paid severance in the round of layoffs last November. There’s no money left to pay severance this time.
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Fun fact: they also made Wallace & Gromit series that's currently unavailable because the IP rights expired. So now neither party gets any money.
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like that’s the only thing that matters to them and not the hundreds of people who lost their jobs with no severance makes me sick. The selfishness of the faceless internet is disgusting
It is the only thing that matters to me. I try to have have a single selfish queue (things that benefit me) and a single selfless queue (things that benefit everyone), and caring about some people not getting severance falls very, very low on the benefit everyone queue.
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@ChaosTheEternal Dammit, saw this in the unread feed and came here to post that Polygon tweet, captioned "Your employees will remember that."
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@pie_flavor said in A Telltale Meltdown:
@ChaosTheEternal Dammit, saw this in the unread feed and came here to post that Polygon tweet, captioned "Your employees will remember that."
Except, in an annoying twist of events, according to game logic, they actually technically won't....
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An article I've seen mentioned poor sales of GotG and Batman as main causes of Telltale's troubles. I haven't seen anything of Batman, but what I've seen of GotG (which I found graphically ugly and its French-language subs were poorly translated) leaves me unsurprised at its fate.
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I loved the Sam&Max and Back to the Future games and plan to purchase the Monkey Island series sometime.
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@Medinoc said in A Telltale Meltdown:
An article I've seen mentioned poor sales of GotG and Batman as main causes of Telltale's troubles. I haven't seen anything of Batman, but what I've seen of GotG (which I found graphically ugly and its French-language subs were poorly translated) leaves me unsurprised at its fate.
That's actually my first reaction too. You can see the most incredible detail on the textures and it won't change how many polygons Drax's head has.
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Telltale skeleton crew laid off
Telltale's final employees have been laid off, ending a rough two weeks for the studio. 250 were left jobless initially, with a handful left to finish projects.
I'm probably repeating myself but under German law, the management would face jailtime for this.
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@Rhywden said in A Telltale Meltdown:
I'm probably repeating myself but under German law, the management would face jailtime for this.
It's pretty common in the game industry, sadly. You work 60-80 hour weeks for a fraction of the rate you'd make working elsewhere, and after a year or two, once the product ships, you're out of a job.
Fortunately and unfortunately, there are plenty of gullible 22-year-olds who like video games enough and are frightened enough of spending forty years in a cubicle filing TPS reports to sustain the farce.
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@Groaner When I was that sort of age, I liked both games and programming a lot, but I spotted what a catastrophe the employment practices were even then. And I got very lucky and found a job in a totally different field with much shorter hours and otherwise decent conditions. (Pay could be higher, but then the major parts of the conditions would be worse.)
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@Groaner said in A Telltale Meltdown:
@Rhywden said in A Telltale Meltdown:
I'm probably repeating myself but under German law, the management would face jailtime for this.
It's pretty common in the game industry, sadly. You work 60-80 hour weeks for a fraction of the rate you'd make working elsewhere, and after a year or two, once the product ships, you're out of a job.
I know that. But that's not what I'm talking about - what the Telltale management did is a classic case of "delayed filing of insolvency" which is indicated by them pretty much shuttering their doors immediately after their two attempts to get more money fell through.
There was literally no money left to pay their employees even a pittance - which is another sign for that.
Basically, whenever your accounts payable exceed your financial potential then you have to declare insolvency so that the company has either a real chance to turn around or be closed down in a controlled manner. Companies which declare insolvency are usually put under new management but they are also protected from creditors for a while and the usual rules regarding the firing of employees don't apply as much.
Also, in cases of delayed insolvency the rules for limited liability companies do not apply - if you as a manager are found guilty of doing this your own assets will be seized and used to pay the creditors. Employees are, by the way, first-tier creditors - they get paid first, then everybody else.
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@Rhywden said in A Telltale Meltdown:
Basically, whenever your accounts payable exceed your financial potential then you have to declare insolvency so that the company has either a real chance to turn around or be closed down in a controlled manner.
But did that actually happen? Given that they were actively seeking capital, they are likely exempt from the federal and state WARN acts. Legally, I'm pretty sure they'll be able to skate on completing the final Walking Dead season.
If both of those hold, their accounts payable were the employees and the licensors. As long as they don't owe licensors anything beyond a percentage of income from sales as they come in, they were never technically insolvent.
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@Unperverted-Vixen Yes, that did happen. The period of time between their prospective investors walking out and the company shutting down is way too short for anything else to have happened.
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@Rhywden said in A Telltale Meltdown:
@Unperverted-Vixen Yes, that did happen. The period of time between their prospective investors walking out and the company shutting down is way too short for anything else to have happened.
Then could you please supply the correct definition of insolvency? The one you supplied does not appear to apply to Telltale.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in A Telltale Meltdown:
@Rhywden said in A Telltale Meltdown:
@Unperverted-Vixen Yes, that did happen. The period of time between their prospective investors walking out and the company shutting down is way too short for anything else to have happened.Then could you please supply the correct definition of insolvency? The one you supplied does not appear to apply to Telltale.
Of course it applies. They did not have a signed contract from their investors and thus already way before they shut down no money to cover their debts, let alone the wages of their employees.
That's not a situation which is completely surprising to the management. They definitely saw the writing on the wall.
You'll note that they shut down shortly before month's end.
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@Rhywden As far as my not-a-lawyer-eye can tell, they didn't have any future obligation to provide employee wages. They have not declared bankruptcy, so they seem to believe that cash on hand plus their income from future sales of existing titles will be enough to service whatever other debts they currently have.
Now, the courts may disagree with the first, given the lawsuit they're currently facing. And if anybody sues them regarding the last two episodes of the final seasion, they may prove to be wrong in that second too. (My understanding is that in European countries courts would say that was between the consumer and the retailer, not the consumer and the manufacturer. Here I doubt that will be the case, but it has to make it as far as a suit first.) But they seem to think that they're able to handle their existing debt just fine.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in A Telltale Meltdown:
But they seem to think that they're able to handle their existing debt just fine.
Yes, that's a frequent reason given for when the judge asks you why you delayed the filing of insolvency.
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@Rhywden said in A Telltale Meltdown:
Telltale skeleton crew laid off
Telltale's final employees have been laid off, ending a rough two weeks for the studio. 250 were left jobless initially, with a handful left to finish projects.
I'm probably repeating myself but under German law, the management would face jailtime for this.
Yeah, how could they steal people's freedom like that!? Capitalist pigs!
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And like a phoenix, rising from the ashes, Telltale appears to be "coming back":
Well, kinda. As far as the article tells, the Telltale name and its catalog were acquired by a new company which is supposedly going to be trying to start back up. The "old company" is still dealing with the lawsuits.
And a bunch of Twitter shitters are dumping all over it because they either:
- Think it's the same owners and staff relaunching the company;
- Balk that what is effectively a startup at this point is wanting to bring the old employees back on freelance contracts that may lead into full time employment;
- Think that everyone everywhere should unionize.
Telltale Games is being revived
