Telltale Games appear to be done.
Cliff_Forster
Icrontian
in Gaming
I'm not entirely surprised that a company that specialized in point and click adventure games failed in 2018, but Telltale made some exceptional adventure games based on beloved properties. The first season of The Walking Dead was one of my favorite games that year. In a genre as niche as it may be, I'm still disappointed that Telltale failed. They made some good product in a genre that absolutely nobody else was paying attention to in 2018. Unless a corporate investor comes along and saves them, I'd say the point and click adventure is officially dead as a mainstream genre.
0
Comments
If they had kept making games as nice as the Walking Dead, but maybe with some more palatable themes, then they would have done better, but most of their catalog was garbage.
I was particularly disappointed by the Back to the Future game.
They got drunk on their success from The Walking Dead and decided to double down and hitch all their horses to that one wagon. Fans were clamoring for, as CB said, other properties to get the same kind of quality and attention that The Walking Dead did, and they failed to deliver.
But Sam and Max you guys.
Wait, did @UPSLynx get a job at Telltale and I didn't realize?
I played The Wolf Among Us, that was also fantastic. Season two of The Walking Dead was alright but I started to bore of the game type, less their execution and more that I'm not exactly a huge fan of the genre. I did enjoy their poker games now that I think of it.
I didn't try the Back to the Future title. But you look at all the licenses they were able to get, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Sam and Max, GOT, they looked like they had the respect of the industry. Oh well.
LOVED the Batman series and Tales from Borderlands
This is precisely what caused the doom of THQ. Big time licenses are not cheap, and if you're not careful with the contract details and can't deliver a stellar product with mass appeal, your company will lose that fight every time, no matter how large.
This whole thing has been uncomfortably familiar to me for obvious reasons. I hate that I saw the same pattern.
Game devs need a union.
https://kotaku.com/it-s-time-for-game-developers-to-unionize-1823992430
I can think of a hundred other industries as well. Our disrespect of organized labor is a massive sociological deficit.
As someone in the indsutry... no... if devs unionize, they'll just outsource everything to India and China, I'm not kidding. A good chunk of dev gets done there already.
What needs to happen, in regards to what happened with Telltale, is more of a reevalutation of how devs get paid and what happens when a studio has to shut down due to mismangament. There needs to be contingency funds to pay for severance etc.
In general, the industry needs to grow up, payscales need reevalutation based on where developers are located (most payscales in the industry are outdated, around where I am for sure because of the dramatic cost of living increases).
But back to the topic at hand with Telltale, not having their own star IP and focusing on IP development internally was a huge problem/mistake. As @UPSLynx pointed out licenses from external big name IPs are not cheap, they might come with investment, but those investors want to see returns or they stop investing.
Telltale had a loud minority touting their games, but in reality that doesnt add up to revenue and captial to keep the studio afloat. It's a shitty situation.
They started tweeting they wanted to find a way to finish what they were working on before they had to layoff 250 people, and my first thought was "if you've got the money to do that, pay the fucking people their severance"... it just seems shady as fuck whatever happened there. An exemployee from there started a class action against them because of WARN in California, hopefully that goes well for them.
As someone who hires devs: No, they won't. They already maximize what they outsource regardless.
The great myth about labor in America is that it's a commodity replaceable with globalized markets. But that's a lie from the business owners to keep folks scared for their job and their wages low. Don't parrot it.
My dad's job was outsourced when I was in college. A developer with 20 years of experience in their systems, and they replaced him with a team in India. So my dad used his severance to buy some books (including many for me!), worked at Toys R Us over the holidays to keep him busy, and got a new job that paid better.
Meanwhile the company realized it'd messed up and within 5 years they were re-hiring his team's positions back in the US. But minus the decades of institutional knowledge. Which made yet another painful transition that cost them more folks who left rather than deal with the pain of it. To my knowledge, not a single laid off developer agreed to return. What had kept them there wasn't the salary, but the camaraderie and culture they'd built there, and that was gone forever. No raise can fix that.
Outsourcing was the boogeyman in technology 20 years ago, yet somehow we still have a severe deficit of engineers, and we still need strong English speakers in our own timezone. It turns out that coding isn't the core skill you need - it's communicating, and everything that encompasses it. No programming quiz in the world can determine that, and it's where most of your value lies.
The idea that you're a cog to be swapped with a cheaper part is insane bullshit that's only perpetuated by bad managers that have fulfilled the Peter Principle.
My team is in constant desperate need of people who can both communicate and code effectively. We're unicorns.
Unfortunately most larger corporations are packed to the gills with bad managers that have fulfilled the Peter Principle, that's why there is such widespread acceptance of the idea that outsourcing will approach 100% for any function that unionizes.
Trying not to get into too broad a discussion about worldwide labor but if you look at the world as it is in 2018 vs 1988, technology is making the world much smaller. Information, the realization that workers in developing nations now have that being asked to live in a small shack or sleep on the factory floor is not actually how the rest of the world lives, it comes from the flow of information. Why do you think a country like China attempts to restrict its citizen’s online freedom? So in the last few years you have had movements in places like China where you see their workers are starting to organize, stage sit ins, hell, at Foxconn they all sat on the roof to get a point across. It can expose companies like Apple who are more concerned about their shareholders then they are labor, and that's the great fallacy of the current state of wealth throughout the world, and it isn't a problem unique to US workers, but it's primarily propagated by US investment, that investment is valued higher than labor. Somehow a shareholder who takes some money and plops it into shares in hopes of making more money, that investor is seen as a more valuable asset to the company than the person on the ground making the product. It's insanity, and it needs to be challenged all over the world for anything to change. They have convinced us that we don't really have leverage, but collectively people can change the game.
I spend more time doing communication training than technical training.