I feel sorry for the employees and apologize in advance if what I'm going to say sounds too negative or blunt, but anyway here is one opinion. Telltale games wasn't a very innovative company. It shouldn't surprise anyone when a company goes bankrupt that primarily produces bad game adoptions of blockbuster movies as a franchise.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm only a gamer and not an industry expert, but it seems to me that too many managerial constraints on creativity and fear of innovation are the #1 game company killers.
Shouldn't surprise anyone, no, but "250 people would find themselves with no job, no severance, and health insurance that would be gone by month’s end — just nine days."
That's appalling, and that's the real issue being discussed in the article, not the failure of the company. Horrific mismanagement of the situation, and shows a complete lack of respect for your staff.
Horrific feels like an understatement, to have the studio collapse like that on short notice without severance and insurance is basically fraud. They made promises to employees - some literally new hires - and then failed to fulfill them. They likely are also reneging on promises they made to partners and investors, all because they decided to try and skate the company along on the hope of big money coming in at the last minute. It's wildly irresponsible under any circumstances but for this to happen at a well-established studio demonstrates catastrophically bad judgement and general moral bankruptcy on the part of studio heads.
It's quite possible they could have entirely avoided this by not scaling the studio so large. 250 people is a LOT for a game studio, even one with multiple projects going. Telltale used to be much smaller and the money might not have run out.
> primarily produces bad game adoptions of blockbuster movies as a franchise.
What are you talking about? Not one of their games is even an adaptation of a movie. Some are related to movies but separate stories not adaptations, and the majority have nothing to do with any movies (this includes the Batman game).
GP did say 'adoption', not 'adaptation'. I think the meaning is conveyed: they consistently tried to build a business of creating games out of existing franchises. But it was every time the same kind of game.
They said "game adoptions of blockbuster movies", and I made no other point than that they are not "adoptions" (whatever that means - I'm pretty sure they meant to say adaptations) of movies.
If your success is connected to building upon the brands of others then don't be shocked if you have little control over how much success you can actually achieve.
I feel sorry for people who lost their jobs but at the end of the day the people who have the creative vision for: Walking Dead, Back to The Future, Jurassic Park, Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, Batman and Guardians of The Galaxy do not sit within the 4 walls of Telltale.
If there is not someone with creative vision and ownership of your product within your company then the people calling the shots are sales and partnerships. Actual product always comes second to closing these deals and riding brands of others.
You can see this in their product lineup, when things went sour they didn't change the product, they just diversified the brands.
> Telltale games wasn't a very innovative company.
based on the article, it seems like most of the telltale developers agreed with you. they cited previous management's unwillingness to deviate from previous successes as the largest source of creative stagnation. the article implies that the newer CEO was making big, positive changes in this area but that it was too little too late for the company.
"years of nonstop crunch culture, toxic management, and frustration from developers who believed the company’s refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation"
I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
Reading "who believed the company’s refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation" makes me laugh.
That would be like a Call of Duty developer or Assassin's Creed developer complaining that the company not diversifying the gameplay leads to stagnation.
I can see from an artists perspective why that's annoying.
But from an investors standpoint, if you have a profitable, winning formula, you use that formula!!
Telltale Games had a unique and successful storytelling formula and some extremely impressive partnerships, and it would be surprising to have seen them abandon their niche just because it got boring.
Of course, they were run into the ground so it's neither here nor there...
CoD and AC are actually good examples because they are two of very, very few franchises that ship a game every 1-2 years like clockwork, and to do this they have multiple studios working on games at the same time. Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey shipped roughly 1 year apart and this required separate studios working on them, basically in parallel. At various points in time Call of Duty has been rotating between 2 or 3 different game studios, effectively making totally separate games with the same* branding.
* The branding isn't really the same either, since CoD lacks strong continuity - with Black Ops and Modern Warfare basically being different games with only some shared elements.
CoD games after COD4 are all similar enough that if you can play well on one of them, you can do the others quite good.
With the exception of BO3 perhaps, because it actually added some more fun gameplay elements. (The running along walls / double jumping).
But in general, the games are all quite similar.
Then again, the days the COD games were actually good games are long gone (in my opinion). CoD2 remains my favourite by far, and CoD4 is a close second. Both of which are over a decade old now.
A successful formula? They had 1 big hit, followed by a neigh collapse of interest that only got worse every game. They then kept at this “successful” model for half a dozen games. Sounds bull headed to me.
If you moved to an expensive area to take a job (which many people did, some of them literally weeks before the Telltale shutdown) you're probably locked into a lease and can't just afford to ditch on short notice. Furthermore, the pay scale for game studios isn't especially generous so these people don't always have a big nest egg. Finding another gig in games is also time consuming and not something you can do on short notice.
Every time I've lined up pro work in games it's taken at least 3-6 months of up front hunting and negotiations before landing it.
fwiw I know lots of former telltale employees and interviewed there at one point. Investment in projects and in coworkers goes a long way and was definitely present there. Some of the people who did end up leading got a lot out of sticking around because the titles they shipped gave them a strong resume to point to.
> I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
I feel the same way. One often hears the statistic that the games industry revenue (~36 Billion) exceeds that of the film (hollywood) industry.
It makes me wonder, given that there's probably fewer workers in games, who is making the lionshare of the money? Is it just a tiny sliver of investors? How did it get that way? One would think that talent could just walk away from toxic workplaces and be paid handsomely elsewhere.
The burden of organizing a group of people large enough to make a triple A game is enormous. Revenues come after long, painful development periods only. Risk is high. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the workers get a tiny proportion, unsatisfactory as that is.
I don't have any statistics but I'd guess a lot of the money goes to the publishers and IP/Licence holders.
Most game studios produce games on behalf of established publishers like EA with licenses from companies like Disney and I would assume they know to take a pretty piece of the cake.
I also have a feeling that the culture in the games industry have been rotting for a while and talent being "abused" has become the norm.
You can be a "rockstar" coder or coding "Wizard" all you want, but you'll probably never reach the paycheck of a good actor.
Once a game company has a hit they become their own angel investor and try to find the next hit. The odds are really low though so most die before finding it. It doesn't help that most companies have no idea why the first game was a hit.
It's easy to hide for a long time because a hit can be so profitable. Look at Riot Games. League of Legends remains their only product even after trying to find another one for a decade. Zynga is still around because in a few short years they got a couple billion in the bank.
Lots of reasons. Not thinking you could find another job being one. Thinking that things will be just as bad elsewhere, so stick with the "devil you know" being another. A version of "battered spouse syndrome", but with employer instead of spouse, being a third.
Even for people who have considerable talent/experience there is often a peak window of opportunity for leaving and if you miss it then it can become a lot more difficult afterward. Putting yourself out into the job market is difficult, and risky. A lot of people work paycheck to paycheck so any disruption to that whatsoever is a risk. Working crunch constantly also burns you out, depriving you of time, energy, and motivation to seek other jobs. You can also get stuck in trying to rationalize your situation. It's super easy to think "this isn't so bad" because you get to work in an office instead of out digging ditches or whatever, because you get to work on "cool stuff you love", because you get to spend all day working alongside a bunch of "cool/fun people" and friends, and so on. And you may not notice the exact point at which each of your justifications top being true, there may be no one glaring tipping point that pushes you to look elsewhere for work.
I don't get how there is not a general insurance system for people losing their jobs unexpectedly which pays out three months of similar or something similar.
No. Actually in most countries "social security" and "unemployment insurance" are 2 different things. Social security IIRC is mostly there to take care of medical expenses, including for employed people.
Social security generally pays unemployment benefits too. How that works is obviously very dependent on the country. Also, at least in the UK there are national funds available to cover redundancy.
And yes, I was being facetious - I'm aware unemployment benefit is often pretty low and that actual income protection insurance does exist.
indeed, in the UK if there's not sufficient money to pay statutory redundancy then there's a national fund to make sure the employees get their legal entitlement
(and if this happens the company's directors are likely in the shit as they've probably been trading while insolvent)
There is "Unemployment Insurance" in America, and companies have to pay into it for their employees by law. Any employee who no-fault loses their job can draw from it.
This company used a "cheat" in the legal system in America for labor where they illegally labeled their employees as "independent contractors", which are treated differently under the law. These contractors aren't "employees" and aren't eligible for unemployment (because they were not 'employed', they were contracted).
For example if you were to hire someone to work on your kitchen for 1 week, you wouldn't pay unemployment insurance on their behalf. If they were self-employed doing remodeling/contracting, they would be expected to pay their own unemployment insurance.
It is unfortunate how the illegal abuse of "independent contracting" in America has created these terrible situations though.
Depends on the country. In NL, the legal requirements for independent contractors are quite strict. As an independent contractor, you must:
- have multiple sources of income/contracts (at least 3, and no single contract may be worth more than 70% of your total income)
- have complete control over how to do your job (i.e. the hiring party can only tell you what to do, not how or when to do it)
- actively promote your own company (acquisition, marketing efforts)
- invest in your own company: your tools (laptop, software licenses) must be your own (they are tax-deductible)
- have your own liability insurance.
If you fail any of these conditions, the tax auditor may classify you as an employee regardless of what the contract says, and both you and your employer may be fined (depending on whether they see you as a victim or an accomplice).
This is nearly all true in America too (not sure about a 3 source/70% rule) but in order to get around it, the conservatives have massively underfunded the tax organization / auditors to the point where they basically cannot even competently audit the criminals, so the average businesses are un-audited by default.
Well then you have to choose between turning down the job for the chance you'll need unemployment insurance or taking the job because you need a job. The rational choice is to take the job regardless.
Not always, at least here in Oregon I received unemployment after being let go from a contractor job. The state tax department had to rule whether or not my contracting work qualified though. They used a couple of factors: whether or not I had set times to be at the office, whether I had to be at the office, how many hours I worked, if they gave me hardware for working there - basically if they were "cheating" as you said.
In the US, there's automatic unemployment insurance. It's run by each state and the programs differ. I believe the federal government has significant influence as well. I don't know anything about the California program but here's what looks like the relevant web site: https://www.edd.ca.gov/unemployment/
These people generally should be eligible (though again I don't know anything about the California program).
Edit: Oh I see a better answer to this. The other post brings up a very important point that people classified as independent contractors are not eligible.
I mean, hundreds of people laid off, some of whom had only recently moved their entire lives across country for their roles, is kind of a sad end mate.
Having been in this exact situation before, its very hard to deal with. One of my employers died at 4:30 on a Thursday, we had 30 minutes to get out of the office before the building management locked the doors, there was no health insurance or severance for anyone (in fact as a contractor I was owed $8000 I never got). At least we all had some idea things were bad so it wasn't a complete surprise. This of course was during the Dotcom collapse so finding another job took me a long time. I've been in company ending situations since then but no matter how many you never feel good. It's easy to feel like you didn't do enough to keep things running (of course its not true) which doesn't help your attitude much. Your job is almost like a family sometimes and that makes it harder. If the employment market is hot its much easier to get over the shock but if its hard to find another job then its much more depressing.
It's so strange how the prestige around the brand was not correlated to the sells numbers. It so strange how their demise was so unexpected by the press and gaming communities when the writing was on the wall long ago.
The games did have significant differences, but the extensive reuse of very old technology had a big negative impact on both development costs and reviews.
Can someone explain more about "making the same game over and over"? I don't know anything about these games. Were they all similar, despite being different franchises?
Telltale's games tended to utilise similar mechanics across their games. They'd generally follow a linear storyline to certain points where players could make choices that changed some outcomes, along with limited scene exploration and the use of quick-time events. There was a lot of noise made about player decisions affecting the overall outcome of the story, but not everybody would agree that this was the case.
They all shared the same narrative focus and gameplay mechanics of titles in the "adventure" game genre (inspect environment, walk around, quick time events, make decisions in conversation or events that at least promised branches in storyline.) Typically the engine and graphics styles were roughly the same, though improved as time progressed (to the point where you often felt they were battling the old engine).
I understand the limitations to this style and the problems became pronounced as time progressed but to have a "Telltale take" on a property, I roughly knew what kind of experience I was getting and at least for a while made me cautiously optimistic for the release (though I may be a minority.)
Yup. LucasArts too obviously. It doesn't really matter if the gameplay is identical and the puzzles similar and formulaic if the story is interesting and the game is fun. Perhaps there's just no appetite for the adventure genre anymore?
Or there is appetite, just not at the speed at which Telltale was pushing out sequels. They have clearly been successful for a while (otherwise hardly anybody would be noticing their demise), but while sequels are comfortably predictable compared to the lottery ticket of a fresh launch, they also come with an inherent limitation: the market for a sequel can be no bigger than the number of people who have already consumed the iteration before and still want more. There will always be losses. Repeat that a few times and numbers will be predictably low. Do the same at a high release cadence and you also lose those who might eventually want a sequel, but not at the prescribed sped, they may not even have finished the previous iteration. Consumers who built up a consumption backlog will lose interest in the whole franchise because they are immune to new release hype.
The Sierra DNA is there, but on a much, much more accessible level (for better or worse depending on how you want to take on the narrative or the game.)
All the games followed the same basic gameplay roadmap.
Event happens -> Talk to other characters -> Another event happens
Usually the events were cutscenes or QTEs (timed button presses) that you either pass or get a gameover if you fail too many.
Now this wouldn't be an issue if the games were marketed as such but instead they tried to present them with the taglines "Your choices have consequences" while it was clearly not the case. You could run the same game twice making completely opposite choices and the end results were always the same; sometimes a character would die but at most that just resulted in some extra dialogue since those characters were designed to be non essential.
Here is an example of what I mean:
Alice is a fugitive on the run and needs a car so she can:
1)Go to her friend Bob and have him drive the car after asking him
2)Threaten Bob to drive her around
In the end Bob is always driving the car and his opinion of you doesn't matter outside a throwaway line where he says "Hey, you owe me!" or "Hey, you're a jerk!"
The illusion of choice is very apparent at times even DURING the game since the events occurring are just too limiting.
It didn't help that Life is Strange and the Witcher 3 came out and had more in depth consequences and exploration of these systems.
I haven't played any of these games either, and the kinds of "press a button in time to make stuff happen" events you describe are something I really hate in games, so I don't think I will.
That said, your description of the illusion of choice in the story... sounds like every story-based videogame ever. I've been playing games since the 90s, and I can't really think of any such games off the top of my head where your choices will lead you down a completely different path.
Commonly the game will have different ending cutscenes depending on your choices, but the main story quest always takes you to the same locations.
Deus Ex was lauded for giving you choices, but you always took the same general path through the game. Maybe you saved that character and then you meet him again for a short conversation much later - but it didn't really matter.
Planescape Torment is often described as the best story-driven RPG ever written. While it had lots of optional sidequests and offered the option to roleplay your character in loads of different ways, in the end you always took the same path through the main storyline.
These are just two examples of higly rated, character- and story-driven games that happen to be among my favorite games of all time.
It's understandable, after all creating content costs money, and content that won't be seen except by a tiny minority of players seems like a sunk cost to the developers.
I agree somewhat; it's pretty difficult to create a COMPLETELY different game. However the second act in Witcher 2 was quite different depending on your choice in the first act to the point that replaying it adds a lof of depth to the overall story and presentation. I heard the 3rd game is just as impressive but I haven't been able to experience it myself
Meanwhile, Deus Ex was revolutionary because it gave you a lot of choice in terms of gameplay variety. Your mission could be to enter a building and just some of the ways could be:
A)Sneak Inside through vents
B)Bribe a guard
C)Impersonate an employee finding a loose ID card
D)Use your high jump to go through the roof
E)Shoot your way in
F)Use a keypad by overhearing the password from a guard
E)Use an explosive to break down a wall
Telltale games did neither of these things and got left behind pretty quickly when it failed to innovate off the success of the Walking Dead
I played The Wolf Among Us twice through. I thought the story was very interesting, and wanted to see what happened if you did everything different. Obviously you know a lot of content is going to be re-used, but by and large probably 95% of it was unchanged. It lowered my opinion substancially, though I still liked it more as a movie/TV show, than a game.
While story based games do have to fight combinatorial explosion of possibilities, games like Planescape Tormet deal with that by having actual gameplay: random encounters, item drops, side quests, leveling up. All the traditional RPG mechanics.
Life is Strange was also panned for having the illusion of choice, but I think was able to resist some of that criticism due to the strength of the story, and the different environment: most of the game is peaceful and sullen, not thrilling, so the limited gameplay isn't necessarily a problem.
There are actually quite a few games that I enjoy because your actions actually mattered in the game, and I highly recommend you try it if you enjoy a good story.
Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human are excellent examples in that your choices actually matter. For example, it's possible to lose a character much earlier on and drastically change how the whole story plays out, or choose an action which entirely changes a few 'stages' you proceed to. There are also a lot of different versions of the ending, either by showing totally different ending scenes, or tweaking some scenes with different characters, or additional cutscenes that change the whole meaning of the ending.Gameplay was also very satisfying for both games, from the things you can do in each stage or the Quick Time Events (QTE) which also change how the story plays out.
In comparison to Telltale's games which are supposed to be about how your choices matter, the only thing that gets affected are some throwaway dialogue and maybe a few short scenes. QTEs are also laughably simple and nearly impossible to fail, and if you do fail you just restart in the last scene anyway.
As others have posted, the game play of all of them are largely the same. They were really fighting their game engine which really limited what they could do. For example, at one point in one of their games the characters had to go into a building and I wondered how they were going to do that because of the limits of the engine. They just played a cut scene instead of having the player do it.
The strengths were in the writing and voice acting.
Sad that an adventure game studio could die off for this reason when "Call of Duty" is pretty much the same game every year and somehow manages to be one of the best selling franchises of all time.
It seems to work for most AAA games.. In fact they usually dont even bother changing IP
eg.
assassins creed series, farcry series, call of duty series, madden series, etc. etc.
Look at the ridiculously popular battle-royale games like fortnight.. They are pretty much clones of each other, and that gameplay has been done (better) decades ago.
Last I recall from playing unreal 2004, there is a slider to select how many life players have when starting a death match.
Battle royale was available, long before battle royale was cool.
There were also a lot of other gameplay available on top of death match, all built in: team death match, assault, onslaught, capture the flags, domination, etc...
There is looting. Weapons, ammo and equipment appear in defined locations at various times.
If you look at good players who win their games, it's a lot about being at the right place at the right time. Get the best stuff and locations for yourself and don't let opponents have anything.
It's not the same kind of looting. In Battle Royale you need to search through houses, locations and move over the map to gather loot and when you kill someone you take their gear. Loot doesn't spawn after start and it's definitely not in defined locations.
Sorry, but you're talking about something completely different.
I think this is more of a current iteration of BR. I would say BR is a little more generic than this. My idea of it, which might not be exactly right I will admit, is just this: A battle royale game is last-man-standing or winner-take-all. The looting, houses, starting gear -- this all seems like variation more than essential.
It seems like what you're describing is definitely the mainstream take on the genre right now, but I think you could make another variant that isn't like the popular ones today but is still a BR.
BR is a very different type of game and especially Fortnight has VERY different game play. It plays nothing like quake or ut. It's much closer to counter strike but with a higher level of tension.
These days I play mostly PUBG. Before that, Day of Infamy. Before that, Insurgency. Notice a trend? Each one of those games has a lot at stake (relatively speaking) when you get into an engagement. If you die, you sit out for a while. They're about communication and coordination between players on the same team.
PUBG (and Fortnite, though that's not my preference) take it to a whole other level. It's not uncommon for me to play a game of PUBG where the first 10-15 minutes is spent either not encountering anyone or spotting them before they spot me and purposefully avoiding them. It's about tactics - either coordination with your squad, or maneuvering into a better position for the next phase of the game, or waiting until someone you're stalking has engaged someone else before engaging them.
Because the preparation is longer, there's more at risk when you actually engage, and the anticipation builds to a crescendo. So, yeah - there may only be seconds of "action" in a PUBG match, but that's the whole point.
This is Fortnite build battling. BR as a whole just refers to a game ruleset that forces and encourages a last-man-standing situation. That part has been done before there was a video game. But the details of what's being communicated are different. They're different even between Rust and PUBG, despite both of them being military styled. Fortnite is in a class of its own since it's cartoonish and the building and mobility options present a lot of unique options. Even comparisons to Minecraft don't fit since the build system is different.
Performing jadedness about the games being "done before" is basically like saying new movies are just collections of old cliches. Even when they are, they end up saying something different.
Battlefield usually annoyed me when I would spend minutes traveling back to the scene of the action. In Fortnite I would spend minutes just trying to find anyone on the map at all sometimes. It feels like I'm doing a lot, lot more of the unfun stuff (traveling) than the fun stuff (shooting and outmaneuvering the opponents). I just can't get into it myself.
I'll just keep playing Quake (actually I'm mainly playing puzzles and graphic novels right now) until people get tired of Battle Royale modes and need a break from them.
Yeah but in those you have some mechanics to use. Telltalle took the adventure game formula, which is mostly exploration and puzzles, and dumbed it down until you were left with linear exploration and kindergarten puzzles. I stopped looking at their titles ages ago because while I grew up with adventure games, the Telltale titles ain't that any more.
Edit: also, games made after a movie license (or a game license, Minecraft Story, wtf?) tend to be crap. Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.
Maybe, if you mean as original as they can be within the restrictions of the franchise.
Personally, I played Borderlands but I never stopped and thought "oh gee, it would be nice to find out more about their background story". I just looked for the next thing to shoot. As for Batman... saturation anyone?
I'm talking for myself. I stopped at like 3 movies and one game (Arkham Asylum was nice, but I didn't want more of the same), then lost interest completely.
Telltale's games since The Walking Dead became narrative focused, essentially the interactive version of a "choose-your-own-adventure" book. Personally I loved the format since I hated the cartoon logic behind a lot of adventure game puzzles, but Telltale never evolved it. Supermassive Games (Until Dawn) and Dontnod (Life is Strange) both showed that you can expand on the concept and tell interesting stories.
I also liked that TWD was narratively focused and more about dialogue and moral dilemmas than puzzles; puzzles in adventure games almost always feel artificial to me. I just wish TWD's dilemmas had resulted in more varied consequences, and of course more plot branching.
They're much closer to the Visual Novel genre then the Adventure Games formula. But even than, most really good VNs that come out of Japan have branching stories. It's dependency on Anime Harem tropes and fanservice notwithstanding, many of the stories (Steins;Gate, Fate/Stay Night comes to mind) branch significantly and well beyond the "600 dead end bad endings and 1 good ending". They're well written and (again, once you get past the fact that you have to rummage through a sex scene you're totally not interested in ever seeing to get to a particular ending) engaging.
Telltale had a chance to take the Visual Novel, clean it up some for more Western sensibilities, and really create a market here for the genre.
Instead you just got a badly rendered machina. It was unfortunate.
That said, I've heard great things about the writing for Minecraft Story from adults. So, you know. If your expectations are appropriate, there's room to be impressed.
Visual Novel is an apt description, though I'll disagree with you on one thing: most Japanese visual novels back when I last checked them, which was in the 90s/early 00s, were terrible. And I mean, really, embarrassingly terrible, and not just for their random and bizarre sex scenes, but overall badly written and cliched. Some of it could be chalked up to poor English translations, but most of it was mind-numbing cliches and nonsensical situations you'd laugh at if found in a book or movie, and which you had to repetitively click through.
That said, yes, I think The Walking Dead Season could accurately be described as a Visual Novel with very little branching, more than a full-fledged point-and-click adventure. I think it succeeds at this; Lee's story is certainly more interesting than whatever happens with Rick & crew in the tremendously repetitive TV show. I can see how Telltale's formula gets repetitive for subsequent games, since it's essentially a one trick pony, but still... I was entertained for one season :)
Fate Stay Night doesn't really branch. It just makes you play it 3 times for 3 different versions of the story. There's very little interactivity, it's more like an author wrote 3 drafts of the same novel where different things happen in each draft than a work of interactive fiction.
Important to keep in mind here that all sales numbers for digital titles are, by necessity, estimates because major marketplaces like Steam not only don't release numbers but place limits on what kind of information developers can release. Previous services for estimating sales numbers were shut down by Valve. SteamSpy was at least fairly accurate up until it was shut down, but it also leaves out sales on consoles and non-steam storefronts.
Another factor is that many of these games are 'prestige brands' like Minecraft or The Walking Dead, which means there may be partnership funding involved. This is demonstrated by how Telltale spoke about keeping a skeleton crew around to finish a game in order to fulfill obligations to partners - if that's happening it's because money changed hands.
(I agree in general with the premise that the writing has been on the wall for Telltale, just not that a steamspy chart is proof that the company was already dead in the water)
Jesus, I knew their sales had been rocky but I didn't realise HOW rocky. I guess the formula they had for games didn't really pay off across multiple instances.
It's similar to how (in general) an industry-wide theme is that episodic titles have significant sales drop-off in later episodes. Sequels do too, albeit less so and less consistently. This is part of why companies selling episodic games (telltale included) try to sell you a whole season up front.
A big notable example is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13 trilogy (3 games, FF13, FF13-2, and Lightning Returns), where IIRC sales basically halved on each release - so Lightning Returns sold about 0.25x what FF13 did [1]. (FF13 sold well, so this is at least not completely dire).
You can often make this up by spending less money to develop later episodes & sequels, which was true for both Telltale and the FF13 trilogy - but eventually it's not sustainable anymore.
I can't help but think there's some truth to all the talk about people growing tired of the same mechanics being used in essentially every Telltale game after the first series of The Walking Dead. Going from personal experience, it was a hell of a ride the first outing but it grew pretty samey even when new settings and stories were applied to it.
Agreed. I tired of the gameplay very quickly after the first game. Felt too contrived and transparent. Couldn’t even force myself to finish the free first chapters of some of their later games. Oh well, it was a nice brief ride.
It wasn't just the gameplay for me, but the episodic format. I grew tired of that, and I would wait until all episodes were released to buy. By then, I might have either forgotten about the game, or could get it for a substantial discount.
It's not just the physical mechanics. The story arcs and puzzles on their games also started feeling formulaic after a while too. Like, if you played one Telltale game, you'd played them all.
Which makes sense, now that I'm hearing how the company was managed - coming up with really original ideas, and making sure they work, takes time and breathing room. You get that out of people that have time to put their feet on the desk and daydream, not people that live on perpetual crunch time.
The gaming press is more press than gaming; they're often people with writing degrees who are disproportionately fond of "literary" games compared to the buying public.
Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game. Their articles often read like someone who is hoping for a regular media house to notice and hire them, rather than a gamer writing for other gamers.
Gaming's biggest personalities are on YouTube and Twitch. ACG, Angry Joe, TB (rip), Dunkey have a significantly better say on whether a game gets played or not. Brothers a tale of sons, is one such game whose success can be in part attributed to TB pushing it very hard, on his YT channel.
Among the younger generation, let's play and streamers are the bigger influencers. At least that is what I feel like looking at my younger cousins.
There are a few good gaming review websites, but the likes of IGN, Polygon and GameSpot feel like surrogate marketting agencies at this point.
I have been gaming literally my entire life save for the first couple years, spending thousands of dollars on games every year, and I have never watched any of those “gaming personalities.”
If it helps add another data point to the mix, I can confirm parent's comment on these personalities and their influence within the gaming community. A number of them often provide in-depth critiques and unexpected insights on game design that take the form of comedic video quasi-essays, and they rack up huge subscriber counts.
Skipping through a “No Commentary” playthrough usually tells me all I need to know about a game before purchasing it, without any subjective opinions of someone else.
Agreed. I have heard of a couple of them but it seems like many of the younger generation is turning to video for their reviews and opinions and not text. I would much rather skim through an article than a video. I see tons of links to opinion videos on reddit but I rarely ever click on them because I don't want to sit through some ad, an opening credit, "Hi Guy! Welcome to my channel. Today I want to talk about..." and other garbage to see if I care about what this person has to say. Even if I skip ahead there is a good chance that I will have to back it up because it seems to skip ahead to the middle of an idea.
I just don't want to sit through a video, period, even ignoring ads etc. Then I have to make sure my volume is actually on, make sure I'm not disturbing anyone, and potentially be judged by the people around me for whatever I'm watching. How these kids just click on videos willy-nilly without a care in the world is mind-boggling for me.
The advantage that these personalities have is that you learn if their tastes match up with yours.
I have learned to never listen to Dunkey when he says a game is "Boring" but his idea of "Fun" matches well with me.
Also I watch some of the Angry Joe reviews because despite his tired theme of being angry all the time, he does a good job extensively covering a game from a semi objective standpoint. And I know when he is hammering home the negative points he is just hamming it up for the views so I don't take them too seriously.
Meanwhile gaming press is just a random assortment of editors with different tastes and values making it harder to discern how well the game will be for me.
That's why I like giantbomb since they are only 5 ish reviewers and you get to learn their tastes pretty easily.
> Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game.
Funny, it seems to me that many gamers don't quite get that not everyone has to have fun exactly the same way they do.
> The gaming press is more press than gaming; they're often people with writing degrees who are disproportionately fond of "literary" games compared to the buying public.
The real question is how influential are they today? I think they might not be that influential when it comes to AAA titles, however, some outlets are extremely influential when it comes to indie gaming, since it's a small scene where "knowing the right person" can make a difference when it comes to coverage.
My problem with the press is that there is essentially 2 categories:
- marketing outlets AKA content farms such a IGN,Gamespot who add very little value to the content they produce as they seek quantity over quality.
- pseudo-intellectual outlets like Eurogamer or Polygon which talk about gaming through the lens of "intersectionality", which is their right, but after 10 hours of work getting yield at by my manager I'm not interested in articles that are more about identity politics than the games I play when I get home.
Personally, I take more pleasure in hearing Joseph Anderson babbling about hitboxes in Dark Souls 2 and how you get critical damages even though the NPC sword stroke was PI/2 radians off your character's position, for 3 hours straight on youtube than any of the former.
>Joseph Anderson babbling about hitboxes in Dark Souls 2 and how you get critical damages even though the NPC sword stroke was PI/2 radians off your character's position...
Yeah, um, that won't get your average gamer excited either.
HN User 'lmm' was right, everyone from the gaming press, to the youtubers, to the people at the conferences etc, publicizing things that the average gamer could care less about. No one cares about hitboxes off by Pi/2 radians, or your "high art" narrative based games, or your slick C# or Rust based backend server and how cool it is.
The press and the youtubers are, of course, free to focus on whatever they want to focus on. I'm just saying that a lot of people out there are just using games as an escape, we really don't want all those details. And I'd go even further, a lot of games, tech, and issues they concentrate on are out and out boring!
I gotta say, though, that the Digital Foundry crew at Eurogamer consistently put out excellent technical analyses of current and (usually every Sunday)retro games. I love it. No politics, no drama, just an in depth look at the tech under the hood.
> The gaming press is more press than gaming; they're often people with writing degrees who are disproportionately fond of "literary" games compared to the buying public.
How does that differ from movie and music press? It's pretty much the same situation - you have big blockbusters which are polished and ground down to be as widely appealing and as mildly offensive as possible. These blockbusters then get ridicoulous marketing spending which shoves them down the throat of as many average people as possible.
But studios like Telltale have no hope of even coming close to competing for that attention - they have nowhere near the marketing budget of Ubisoft, EA, Activision. They need to appeal to smaller niche audiences to not get just eaten by large publishers doing the same thing better and with more pomp.
> How does that differ from movie and music press? It's pretty much the same situation - you have big blockbusters which are polished and ground down to be as widely appealing and as mildly offensive as possible. These blockbusters then get ridicoulous marketing spending which shoves them down the throat of as many average people as possible.
Limited personal experience, but: the music journalists I've known really loved music. Many were in their own bands. There was a certain amount of indie one-upmanship, there was also a deep appreciation and respect for the medium in general, even when faced with genres they didn't get on with. They also spent a hell of a lot of time on music, even when not on the clock. I don't get that sense from video game journalism at all; if anything several of them seem to wish they were movie critics. The depth of detailed technical knowledge just isn't there - music and film journalists throw light both on the techniques used to make music and film, and the process of production itself, in a way that video game reporting doesn't.
Worth noting that this data is from steamspy (http://steamspy.com/about) so only covers Steam, and is also not fully accurate.
How representative it is of the overall picture I can't say. I would imagine that Telltale's style of games sell more on phones/tablets and on consoles, but of course the sales on those platforms may well show the same trends over time.
Indications seem to be that Minecraft: Story Mode was the studio's next most profitable after TWD S1 (and why the Netflix Minecraft: Story Mode project is the last project in the black-ish and the last project they seem required to try to finish), which is definitely not visible in the steamspy statistics, and definitely an indicator of the importance to non-Steam sales.
That's one of the reason why big studio don't create new IPs very often, it's very expensive / risky, a false move and you can lay off hundred of people.
TWDS1 was free many times, and has been included in Humble Bundles for years, so these numbers don't reflect actual sales or desire to purchase the game at full price or even on sale, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
The problem was that TellTale promised games in which your decisions actually affect the game world as opposed to just slight changes in character dialog with a game on rails. While they did improve this mechanic a little in later games, it was still too little too late. I'm pretty sure it was this that affected their sales long term. In their defense, very few games are able to actually pull this off despite their marketing.
I suspect at least part of it came from Telltale getting access to all these big IPs. I mean, if they're making games based on the Walking Dead and Minecraft and Batman and Game of Thrones they have to be doing well, right? You don't expect the film studio adapting Lord of the Rings or James Bond to be in financial peril, so maybe the same would seem true for game developers too.
But of course, names don't tell the full picture, and even major brands can sell poorly if the product isn't interesting/great (like many later Telltale titles).
I can not understand how it is legal to dismiss a worker with less than 14 days notice. Those are great workers rights! Thanks god we still have some of them here in Spain (although some have already been diminished).
The company didn't cease to exist; they still had (have?) employees finishing existing contracts. They also tried to raise money to staff back up and finish off the Walking Dead games.
It sucks but if there is literally no money left then the company is simply not able to fulfill its obligations. Like if pay is owed where will that money come from?
I don’t excuse management for a second; they must have known the coffers were bare while they were still hiring.
If I'm not mistaken, here in Belgium first the assets of the company are sold off and from that money, first the employees are paid out their contracts.
After that the money goes to other instances (like the loan by the bank etc).
EDIT: They are paid out their outstanding wage for their performed work, not to the end of their contracts
I hear about game studios going under like this a lot.
Is it just that games companies suffering the same fate get more coverage in the media, or is it something about game studios that seem to make them more likely to crash and burn like this?
I know that games are quite consumer's-whim-driven and you're never really sure if you've got a hit on your hands or not until you release. I guess it is the same for movies, yet I've never heard of any movies spectacuarly just going bust half-way through filming and just abandonning what they are doing and packing it in (although I have heard of some near-misses). Yet it seems to happen a lot for games comapanies?
What gives?
P.S. sucks for the people working on this. Hope you all find something new!
The comparison to movies seems apt. Games industry has the same problems that Early Hollywood had (high crash rate and a lot of employee anguish), and a lot of these stories match early days histories of Hollywood. The solution to that was strong unions. Film companies still have a high crash rate, though now it is much more intentionally controlled (Hollywood has organized development companies to very specifically be only for the scope of a single film project), and more importantly employee anguish from the intentional turnover is mitigated by strong union protections and safety nets.
The interesting part is that Hollywood is dealing with a cycle of this sort of suffering currently with Special Effects houses. The CG special effects companies are often contracted for only a single set piece at a time in a movie, as companies they currently last about at most 2 years and involvement in scenes in two and a half films, and there is a lot of employee anguish because a lot of the artists involved have generally not been allowed to unionize (or heavily discouraged from unionizing), especially in the smaller contractors. Most of the Oscars presented for Best Special Effects in the last few years have involved at least one firm that was dead by the time of the Oscars award. It's not making the news as much as game studio suffering, but it's a similar problem in that both industries feel that they can afford to burn through talent cheaper than it takes to protect it, as there are always excitable young kids happy to get their shot in Hollywood or Videogames.
Fascinating to see how very little commentary there is here related to the cultural problems this company was known for. Guess culture was never a factor to gamers.
“/../ hundreds still tumbled into unemployment with no safety net from their company.“
To be honest a company that can “barely keep its head above water” wont be in shape to provide a lot of support. That is kind of the point, if they could do that then maybe they could keep the company afloat which is a bit paradoxical.
It would be nice situations like these to have some form of safety net in form of financial aid or something. I have no idea what they do in the US but in Sweden you can get a lot of help since these things happen with companies from time to time.
That depends on the role taken. Artists are fairly fungible (probably unfairly) because they can be shown a bunch of examples and told "make something that fits with this". Coders are fungible only if you're comparing wizard-level coders who can read, understand and fix / improve a game's codebase.
Don't work in the games industry. This is the par story for game companies. Every little detail of this story I saw repeating on loop in a decade of working in games. The artists grabbing assets to stuff into their portfolios before two years of professional work disappears into a black hole, the ppl moving families across country to be laid off months later, the crunch, the over promising, it is all text book.
The games industry preys on young ppl who don't know what a healthy work/life balance looks like. The pay is lower because employees are passionate. Passion doesn't pay rent. It doesn't provide stability for your partner and children who all will suffer because you chose to work in games.
Your passion will be compromised endlessly by marketing and management who can air drop in and change a game's entire direction in one meeting. Because they saw a Minecraft commercial and their kid responded to it. They'll make you work weekend after weekend to fit their pivot into the original schedule and stop in for an hour to drop off donuts. Oh good, eight hours of work for a donut. Donuts also don't pay rent. They don't fix your marital problems.
Games is an industry stuck in a groundhog day loop of misery. This is my warning to anyone who thinks they like games enough to make them. You won't like them after making them. It isn't worth it.
I honestly wish I could disagree but it's probably the most soul sucking industry out there.
Yeah there are great companies but considering that just this year alone there were over 1,000 layoffs [1] in an industry that there are just a handful of large developers / publishers it's hard to get a position where you aren't just churning out gambling apps or one off VR projects for a Big Media Company trying to make a quick buck.
The issue is that video games are entertainment and the industry is built off the back of exploited workers that are genuinely passionate but have no resources outside of becoming indie (which is basically rolling the dice) or just using their talents elsewhere.
I heard doing 3D cgi stuff for movies is a pretty similar situation but worse tend to be worse as they are contract positions out here in LA/Hollywood area.
Highly recommend against the latter, unless if you’re willing to do it for free. The glut of indie games in the past few years means that the average indie dev will get paid literally pennies per hour or less.
Do it for fun if you want, but doing it for the money will lead to heartbreak.
Yeah in like a 3 year period it went from under 1000 new indie games on steam to over 7000. Past successful devs like the guy who made Binding of Issac have tried making new games recently that would have done amazingly back in the day, only to see them buried and get next to no attention. The space is now saturated. Indie game dev is now as difficult as publishing an award winning novel.
Lottery tickets don't demand that you wear multiple hats and grind for years. Even if you bought a ticket every day it's probably cheaper than quitting your job and eating into your savings for a chance at an indie moonshot.
The hobby project route is pretty much the only way.
If you are young, single and healthy, and can work on important parts of a game (engine), do it for 1-2 years, have a blast, ship an AAA game, then escape to more stable FAANG, where you will be a highly paid guru. You can even write a book or two then, documenting your tricks and achievements.
Why? You’ll come out older, less healthy, poorer, and full of regret that you spent your time building casinos for children and people with gambling issues. If you’re going to work for a FAANG anyway, at least you can sell your integrity for a much higher price and better conditions.
I mean only if you can work on "core", something that is extraordinarily difficult and you can impress everybody with it. I am not talking about joining a team working on end credits scrolling etc.
At least it'd be good practice for building casinos for non-children. Slot machine development uses a lot of the same skills (and often the same stack; IGT uses C# and Unity3D for their slot machines if their jobs postings are anything to go by).
Just as a counterpoint - I've worked for 4 years now as a programmer at one of the biggest publishers in the industry, and honestly, the work life balance is great, the pay is ok for the region(plus I get decent amount of shares every year), the work is varied, interesting and I like both what I do and people I work with. I think the last time I did overtime was 2 years ago, and even then it was only for a week around launch of the last project(in fact in every studio meeting we are constantly reminded that managers can NOT demand us to work overtime, if they do we need to report it higher up). Normally I get in at 8am, leave by 4pm, never work weekends or anything like that. Plus the usual for EU 25 paid days off(plus the studio is closed christmas to new years), unlimited paid sick leave, private health insurance.....really, it's pretty good.
But then again, I am aware that most studios are not like that.
Obviously we pay for it with lower salaries. Or, well, actually I don't know what US gamedev salaries are like but for other programming jobs, the difference is significant, also outside the SFBA.
Wanted to add my agreement to this; I've been in the industry since 2008. My first experience was really bad...then I moved to the EU. We do still do overtime, not mandated but when you have to ship it happens. Other than that the benefits, paid time off, work/life balance, union representation, etc have been very good in my experience.
Congrats, you've found the 2% of the industry that isn't insane.
For many of us who fell into the other 98% the statistics aren't in your favor and some of the bigger publishers(EA, Microsoft) tend to go in ~6 year cycles.
Had a friend who worked on Dead Space, which should have been a stable thing. Alas, Visceral isn't around either.
I’ve worked in games for 20 years. The way I make it work is to accept that it is insane. Have a savings cushion. Network so that finding a new job is easy. Generally, make sure you are OK if you find chains on the door tomorrow morning. Also helps to not be a morning person. Everyone but management knows that overtime is anti-productive. But, they usually only count heads after 6. Working from 10-7 keeps us both happy.
When I was in that industry I worked 8am-6pm because I was able to be more productive when the office was empty than being some night owl who stayed in the office till 2am.
I caught no end of shit because I was "walking out the door at 6pm". People weren't blocked, I wasn't leaving anyone in a state where they couldn't do work.
God forbid I wanted to spend a bit of time with my wife(then GF, I can't believe she put up with it). There's some interesting technical problems in that industry but it's not worth the hell you go through for the rest of it. Saw 3 divorces on my last team before I got out and that was all I needed to know that it wasn't a healthy industry to be in.
For all the newbs out there, if you're trying to figure out whether not to accept an offer, know that there is a huge difference in work life balance from company to company: above you've seen the two extremes.
I can't even play anymore. I've seen firsthand how the industry treats developers, and I cannot bring myself to send money into the pockets of the fratboy shitheels that run it.
The “upside” is that it’s never been easier to not play AAA games. Between derivative content rehashes yearly, insane microtransaction schemes, content cut into pieces and locked behind multiple season passes and dlc, and the endless busywork “gameplay” designed to maiximize engagement and money over time at the direct expense of fun... fuck it.
Look at the new Assassin’s Creed game, which is a reskin of Origins, plus a dozen pages of “buy this shit!” The xp system is rigged to make it a slog and a grind unless you buy “boosts” and it’s a giant map filled with what amount to chores. I feel badly for kids who grow up thinking that skinner boxes connected to a publisher’s bank account are what games have to be, but I’m not touching that stuff.
Meanwhile there are great mid-tier games, indie games, and the very occasional AAA effort that doesn’t punish the player for playing. It only really gets hard when something like CDPR makes great games that don’t monetize outrageously, but also famously treat their employees like dirt.
It's par for the course for AC games. Most of them are reskins of the previous with minor evolutionary tweaks. Brotherhood was a near carbon copy of AC2. AC3 tried to reinvent the series but it was significantly poorly received. Black Flag put more emphasis on sailing ships, but that was already done to lesser degrees by AC3 and Rogue. Origins was really the only one in the series to make a significant change to the combat, progression, and inventory system.
Not that this is necessarily bad, Ubisoft has gotten really good at building these sorts of open world games, and the market seems to agree that having minor changes to the same formula is a good approach.
A huge problem with GameDev is that there's a huge group of 20-somethings fresh into the job market with tech skills who think of it as their dream job and are fully willing to be abused and exploited in order to work in the industry. It takes years for them to be burned out, at which point there's another batch of eager young go-getters willing to fill their void. This dynamic means that even at the worst companies there is never a shortage of workers willing to grind through the endless crunch-time and put up with horrible working conditions and worse processes in order to get games to market.
Things used to be almost as bad in the software dev industry as a whole several decades back, except software dev moved on and got (a little) better. Additionally, a lot of those folks back then had substantial equity, whereas that's really not the case in GameDev today. There's an endless supply of disposable workers today, and that takes a lot of pressure off the industry to do better. Some places do better, but mostly through their own volition. And, unfortunately, such places are all too rare.
Guilty thought: it's probably good for the rest of us that these kids lock themselves into the dumpster of game dev, otherwise they'd be undermining labor markets elsewhere.
> These sources [...] paint a consistent picture of a company desperately struggling to keep its head above water.
No? Manager start doing this when their profits dwindle, not when the company has no cash left. The basic idea is to get one or two more bonus checks while the others lose their homes. You can be sure that some people still made a profit.
> “[Hawley] came into a situation where the staff needed a strong leader with a clear vision,” says a former employee.
Does anybody remember how Dunder Miflin tried to pursuade the stockholders by presenting Michael Scott as the hero who would turn things around?
And one thing I don't really get is why one brings oneself in a situation where one works ones ass off in exchange for living paycheck-to-paycheck. You should have a decent amount of spare time (or time for personal projects at least) and turn a profit, otherwise why work this job at all? I mean gaming industry is not a career you work in because you need to feed 3 children and don't have another choice.
> "These sources, who were granted anonymity in order to speak freely and without fear of retribution,..."
What retribution? They were fired with no severance or time to prepare. Why don't they just speak out against the company that doesn't exist anymore and left them on the street?
Because then you seem like a complainer or a troublemaker. You get an interview at another company (where there are dozens if not hundreds of other people applying) and they google you. Would they hire the person who complained about terrible work conditions or one of the other people who hasn't?
You can tell a lot about how a game is doing when you pay attention to the "let's play" videos on Youtube. People have been complaining about how short telltale games were, how they always look the same etc. for a while now. I'm surprised the company didn't try to do things even a little bit differently.
The gaming industry is a tough place to be. I have so much respect for game designers, 3D artists, animators. Because it takes a lot of time, skill, rendering and sleepless nights to get something good out. Unfortunately, most game companies are controlled by mediocre people at the top, who run things like a sweatshop.
Ultimately most of these game studios are working for Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Valve.
More pressure should be put on those mega-corporations to reduce the commissions they charge developers who release games on their platforms - currently 30%.
The consoles are not supercomputers anymore like the PS3, they mostly use off the shelf (AMD) hardware and x86 architecture. Soon they will just stream the game directly to a thin client which will only handle time-sensitive calculations like input and collision. On PC this 30% commission is even less justifiable since the platform is open and there is no hardware for Valve to get involved with.
Cutting this commission would immediately put money into the hands of games studios and improve conditions for workers, whilst still leaving the platform holders ridiculously profitable. Its a shame no one has been first to move on this - Microsoft with Xbox would seem a good candidate given their desperation to attract devs to the platform and away from PS4/Sony.
I think Telltale is just classic bad management. Not much different from other industries. I think the industry can make for a good career - find a small-ish studio with a string of successful releases and low overhead (no crappy legacy engine to maintain, cheap location).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadCorrect me if I'm wrong, I'm only a gamer and not an industry expert, but it seems to me that too many managerial constraints on creativity and fear of innovation are the #1 game company killers.
That's appalling, and that's the real issue being discussed in the article, not the failure of the company. Horrific mismanagement of the situation, and shows a complete lack of respect for your staff.
It's quite possible they could have entirely avoided this by not scaling the studio so large. 250 people is a LOT for a game studio, even one with multiple projects going. Telltale used to be much smaller and the money might not have run out.
What are you talking about? Not one of their games is even an adaptation of a movie. Some are related to movies but separate stories not adaptations, and the majority have nothing to do with any movies (this includes the Batman game).
They did do a ton of work (exclusively?) with other people's IPs, which may have been what they were trying to say.
At least their "Wolf among us" was an extremely enjoyable adaptation of an existing comic book franchise with a novel story.
Not to mention Tales from the Borderlands being one of the funniest games I've ever played.
On the other hand, the new Walking Dead seasons and Game of Thrones were exceedingly dull.
I feel sorry for people who lost their jobs but at the end of the day the people who have the creative vision for: Walking Dead, Back to The Future, Jurassic Park, Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, Batman and Guardians of The Galaxy do not sit within the 4 walls of Telltale.
If there is not someone with creative vision and ownership of your product within your company then the people calling the shots are sales and partnerships. Actual product always comes second to closing these deals and riding brands of others.
You can see this in their product lineup, when things went sour they didn't change the product, they just diversified the brands.
based on the article, it seems like most of the telltale developers agreed with you. they cited previous management's unwillingness to deviate from previous successes as the largest source of creative stagnation. the article implies that the newer CEO was making big, positive changes in this area but that it was too little too late for the company.
I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
That would be like a Call of Duty developer or Assassin's Creed developer complaining that the company not diversifying the gameplay leads to stagnation.
I can see from an artists perspective why that's annoying.
But from an investors standpoint, if you have a profitable, winning formula, you use that formula!!
Telltale Games had a unique and successful storytelling formula and some extremely impressive partnerships, and it would be surprising to have seen them abandon their niche just because it got boring.
Of course, they were run into the ground so it's neither here nor there...
Activision and Ubisoft offer different games.
* The branding isn't really the same either, since CoD lacks strong continuity - with Black Ops and Modern Warfare basically being different games with only some shared elements.
With the exception of BO3 perhaps, because it actually added some more fun gameplay elements. (The running along walls / double jumping).
But in general, the games are all quite similar.
Then again, the days the COD games were actually good games are long gone (in my opinion). CoD2 remains my favourite by far, and CoD4 is a close second. Both of which are over a decade old now.
Every time I've lined up pro work in games it's taken at least 3-6 months of up front hunting and negotiations before landing it.
fwiw I know lots of former telltale employees and interviewed there at one point. Investment in projects and in coworkers goes a long way and was definitely present there. Some of the people who did end up leading got a lot out of sticking around because the titles they shipped gave them a strong resume to point to.
It makes me wonder, given that there's probably fewer workers in games, who is making the lionshare of the money? Is it just a tiny sliver of investors? How did it get that way? One would think that talent could just walk away from toxic workplaces and be paid handsomely elsewhere.
Most game studios produce games on behalf of established publishers like EA with licenses from companies like Disney and I would assume they know to take a pretty piece of the cake.
I also have a feeling that the culture in the games industry have been rotting for a while and talent being "abused" has become the norm.
You can be a "rockstar" coder or coding "Wizard" all you want, but you'll probably never reach the paycheck of a good actor.
It's easy to hide for a long time because a hit can be so profitable. Look at Riot Games. League of Legends remains their only product even after trying to find another one for a decade. Zynga is still around because in a few short years they got a couple billion in the bank.
And yes, I was being facetious - I'm aware unemployment benefit is often pretty low and that actual income protection insurance does exist.
True, so why make a broad statement about a continent that includes 30-ish countries, each with their own system, only based on "the UK-way"?
(and if this happens the company's directors are likely in the shit as they've probably been trading while insolvent)
This company used a "cheat" in the legal system in America for labor where they illegally labeled their employees as "independent contractors", which are treated differently under the law. These contractors aren't "employees" and aren't eligible for unemployment (because they were not 'employed', they were contracted).
For example if you were to hire someone to work on your kitchen for 1 week, you wouldn't pay unemployment insurance on their behalf. If they were self-employed doing remodeling/contracting, they would be expected to pay their own unemployment insurance.
It is unfortunate how the illegal abuse of "independent contracting" in America has created these terrible situations though.
- have multiple sources of income/contracts (at least 3, and no single contract may be worth more than 70% of your total income)
- have complete control over how to do your job (i.e. the hiring party can only tell you what to do, not how or when to do it)
- actively promote your own company (acquisition, marketing efforts)
- invest in your own company: your tools (laptop, software licenses) must be your own (they are tax-deductible)
- have your own liability insurance.
If you fail any of these conditions, the tax auditor may classify you as an employee regardless of what the contract says, and both you and your employer may be fined (depending on whether they see you as a victim or an accomplice).
The game industry seems pretty terrible to their workers.
Either way the employees had to know.
These people generally should be eligible (though again I don't know anything about the California program).
Edit: Oh I see a better answer to this. The other post brings up a very important point that people classified as independent contractors are not eligible.
https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX
It's so strange how the prestige around the brand was not correlated to the sells numbers. It so strange how their demise was so unexpected by the press and gaming communities when the writing was on the wall long ago.
I understand the limitations to this style and the problems became pronounced as time progressed but to have a "Telltale take" on a property, I roughly knew what kind of experience I was getting and at least for a while made me cautiously optimistic for the release (though I may be a minority.)
Usually the events were cutscenes or QTEs (timed button presses) that you either pass or get a gameover if you fail too many.
Now this wouldn't be an issue if the games were marketed as such but instead they tried to present them with the taglines "Your choices have consequences" while it was clearly not the case. You could run the same game twice making completely opposite choices and the end results were always the same; sometimes a character would die but at most that just resulted in some extra dialogue since those characters were designed to be non essential.
Here is an example of what I mean: Alice is a fugitive on the run and needs a car so she can:
1)Go to her friend Bob and have him drive the car after asking him 2)Threaten Bob to drive her around
In the end Bob is always driving the car and his opinion of you doesn't matter outside a throwaway line where he says "Hey, you owe me!" or "Hey, you're a jerk!"
The illusion of choice is very apparent at times even DURING the game since the events occurring are just too limiting.
It didn't help that Life is Strange and the Witcher 3 came out and had more in depth consequences and exploration of these systems.
That said, your description of the illusion of choice in the story... sounds like every story-based videogame ever. I've been playing games since the 90s, and I can't really think of any such games off the top of my head where your choices will lead you down a completely different path.
Commonly the game will have different ending cutscenes depending on your choices, but the main story quest always takes you to the same locations.
Deus Ex was lauded for giving you choices, but you always took the same general path through the game. Maybe you saved that character and then you meet him again for a short conversation much later - but it didn't really matter.
Planescape Torment is often described as the best story-driven RPG ever written. While it had lots of optional sidequests and offered the option to roleplay your character in loads of different ways, in the end you always took the same path through the main storyline.
These are just two examples of higly rated, character- and story-driven games that happen to be among my favorite games of all time.
It's understandable, after all creating content costs money, and content that won't be seen except by a tiny minority of players seems like a sunk cost to the developers.
Meanwhile, Deus Ex was revolutionary because it gave you a lot of choice in terms of gameplay variety. Your mission could be to enter a building and just some of the ways could be:
A)Sneak Inside through vents B)Bribe a guard C)Impersonate an employee finding a loose ID card D)Use your high jump to go through the roof E)Shoot your way in F)Use a keypad by overhearing the password from a guard E)Use an explosive to break down a wall
Telltale games did neither of these things and got left behind pretty quickly when it failed to innovate off the success of the Walking Dead
While story based games do have to fight combinatorial explosion of possibilities, games like Planescape Tormet deal with that by having actual gameplay: random encounters, item drops, side quests, leveling up. All the traditional RPG mechanics.
Life is Strange was also panned for having the illusion of choice, but I think was able to resist some of that criticism due to the strength of the story, and the different environment: most of the game is peaceful and sullen, not thrilling, so the limited gameplay isn't necessarily a problem.
Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human are excellent examples in that your choices actually matter. For example, it's possible to lose a character much earlier on and drastically change how the whole story plays out, or choose an action which entirely changes a few 'stages' you proceed to. There are also a lot of different versions of the ending, either by showing totally different ending scenes, or tweaking some scenes with different characters, or additional cutscenes that change the whole meaning of the ending.Gameplay was also very satisfying for both games, from the things you can do in each stage or the Quick Time Events (QTE) which also change how the story plays out.
In comparison to Telltale's games which are supposed to be about how your choices matter, the only thing that gets affected are some throwaway dialogue and maybe a few short scenes. QTEs are also laughably simple and nearly impossible to fail, and if you do fail you just restart in the last scene anyway.
The strengths were in the writing and voice acting.
Also your argument is flawed. After all, all football matches are the same.
eg. assassins creed series, farcry series, call of duty series, madden series, etc. etc.
Look at the ridiculously popular battle-royale games like fortnight.. They are pretty much clones of each other, and that gameplay has been done (better) decades ago.
As an aside, I loved Tribes 2 construction mod.
Battle royale was available, long before battle royale was cool.
There were also a lot of other gameplay available on top of death match, all built in: team death match, assault, onslaught, capture the flags, domination, etc...
If you look at good players who win their games, it's a lot about being at the right place at the right time. Get the best stuff and locations for yourself and don't let opponents have anything.
Sorry, but you're talking about something completely different.
It seems like what you're describing is definitely the mainstream take on the genre right now, but I think you could make another variant that isn't like the popular ones today but is still a BR.
That's exactly why we play BR games.
These days I play mostly PUBG. Before that, Day of Infamy. Before that, Insurgency. Notice a trend? Each one of those games has a lot at stake (relatively speaking) when you get into an engagement. If you die, you sit out for a while. They're about communication and coordination between players on the same team.
PUBG (and Fortnite, though that's not my preference) take it to a whole other level. It's not uncommon for me to play a game of PUBG where the first 10-15 minutes is spent either not encountering anyone or spotting them before they spot me and purposefully avoiding them. It's about tactics - either coordination with your squad, or maneuvering into a better position for the next phase of the game, or waiting until someone you're stalking has engaged someone else before engaging them.
Because the preparation is longer, there's more at risk when you actually engage, and the anticipation builds to a crescendo. So, yeah - there may only be seconds of "action" in a PUBG match, but that's the whole point.
https://youtu.be/ffryiLmQb1U
This is Fortnite build battling. BR as a whole just refers to a game ruleset that forces and encourages a last-man-standing situation. That part has been done before there was a video game. But the details of what's being communicated are different. They're different even between Rust and PUBG, despite both of them being military styled. Fortnite is in a class of its own since it's cartoonish and the building and mobility options present a lot of unique options. Even comparisons to Minecraft don't fit since the build system is different.
Performing jadedness about the games being "done before" is basically like saying new movies are just collections of old cliches. Even when they are, they end up saying something different.
I'll just keep playing Quake (actually I'm mainly playing puzzles and graphic novels right now) until people get tired of Battle Royale modes and need a break from them.
Unreal and Fortnight are made by the same company by the way. It's really a reskin with adjusted gameplay settings.
Edit: also, games made after a movie license (or a game license, Minecraft Story, wtf?) tend to be crap. Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.
Weren't most of Telltale's stories original? I didn't play any of the others, but I know the Borderlands and Batman ones were.
Personally, I played Borderlands but I never stopped and thought "oh gee, it would be nice to find out more about their background story". I just looked for the next thing to shoot. As for Batman... saturation anyone?
Telltale had a chance to take the Visual Novel, clean it up some for more Western sensibilities, and really create a market here for the genre.
Instead you just got a badly rendered machina. It was unfortunate.
That said, I've heard great things about the writing for Minecraft Story from adults. So, you know. If your expectations are appropriate, there's room to be impressed.
That said, yes, I think The Walking Dead Season could accurately be described as a Visual Novel with very little branching, more than a full-fledged point-and-click adventure. I think it succeeds at this; Lee's story is certainly more interesting than whatever happens with Rick & crew in the tremendously repetitive TV show. I can see how Telltale's formula gets repetitive for subsequent games, since it's essentially a one trick pony, but still... I was entertained for one season :)
Another factor is that many of these games are 'prestige brands' like Minecraft or The Walking Dead, which means there may be partnership funding involved. This is demonstrated by how Telltale spoke about keeping a skeleton crew around to finish a game in order to fulfill obligations to partners - if that's happening it's because money changed hands.
(I agree in general with the premise that the writing has been on the wall for Telltale, just not that a steamspy chart is proof that the company was already dead in the water)
A big notable example is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13 trilogy (3 games, FF13, FF13-2, and Lightning Returns), where IIRC sales basically halved on each release - so Lightning Returns sold about 0.25x what FF13 did [1]. (FF13 sold well, so this is at least not completely dire).
You can often make this up by spending less money to develop later episodes & sequels, which was true for both Telltale and the FF13 trilogy - but eventually it's not sustainable anymore.
1: http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/27/lightning-returns-lowes...
Which makes sense, now that I'm hearing how the company was managed - coming up with really original ideas, and making sure they work, takes time and breathing room. You get that out of people that have time to put their feet on the desk and daydream, not people that live on perpetual crunch time.
Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game. Their articles often read like someone who is hoping for a regular media house to notice and hire them, rather than a gamer writing for other gamers.
Gaming's biggest personalities are on YouTube and Twitch. ACG, Angry Joe, TB (rip), Dunkey have a significantly better say on whether a game gets played or not. Brothers a tale of sons, is one such game whose success can be in part attributed to TB pushing it very hard, on his YT channel.
Among the younger generation, let's play and streamers are the bigger influencers. At least that is what I feel like looking at my younger cousins.
There are a few good gaming review websites, but the likes of IGN, Polygon and GameSpot feel like surrogate marketting agencies at this point.
And I wish these kids would get off my lawn!
I have learned to never listen to Dunkey when he says a game is "Boring" but his idea of "Fun" matches well with me.
Also I watch some of the Angry Joe reviews because despite his tired theme of being angry all the time, he does a good job extensively covering a game from a semi objective standpoint. And I know when he is hammering home the negative points he is just hamming it up for the views so I don't take them too seriously.
Meanwhile gaming press is just a random assortment of editors with different tastes and values making it harder to discern how well the game will be for me.
That's why I like giantbomb since they are only 5 ish reviewers and you get to learn their tastes pretty easily.
Funny, it seems to me that many gamers don't quite get that not everyone has to have fun exactly the same way they do.
The real question is how influential are they today? I think they might not be that influential when it comes to AAA titles, however, some outlets are extremely influential when it comes to indie gaming, since it's a small scene where "knowing the right person" can make a difference when it comes to coverage.
My problem with the press is that there is essentially 2 categories:
- marketing outlets AKA content farms such a IGN,Gamespot who add very little value to the content they produce as they seek quantity over quality.
- pseudo-intellectual outlets like Eurogamer or Polygon which talk about gaming through the lens of "intersectionality", which is their right, but after 10 hours of work getting yield at by my manager I'm not interested in articles that are more about identity politics than the games I play when I get home.
Personally, I take more pleasure in hearing Joseph Anderson babbling about hitboxes in Dark Souls 2 and how you get critical damages even though the NPC sword stroke was PI/2 radians off your character's position, for 3 hours straight on youtube than any of the former.
Yeah, um, that won't get your average gamer excited either.
HN User 'lmm' was right, everyone from the gaming press, to the youtubers, to the people at the conferences etc, publicizing things that the average gamer could care less about. No one cares about hitboxes off by Pi/2 radians, or your "high art" narrative based games, or your slick C# or Rust based backend server and how cool it is.
The press and the youtubers are, of course, free to focus on whatever they want to focus on. I'm just saying that a lot of people out there are just using games as an escape, we really don't want all those details. And I'd go even further, a lot of games, tech, and issues they concentrate on are out and out boring!
https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalFoundry
How does that differ from movie and music press? It's pretty much the same situation - you have big blockbusters which are polished and ground down to be as widely appealing and as mildly offensive as possible. These blockbusters then get ridicoulous marketing spending which shoves them down the throat of as many average people as possible.
But studios like Telltale have no hope of even coming close to competing for that attention - they have nowhere near the marketing budget of Ubisoft, EA, Activision. They need to appeal to smaller niche audiences to not get just eaten by large publishers doing the same thing better and with more pomp.
Limited personal experience, but: the music journalists I've known really loved music. Many were in their own bands. There was a certain amount of indie one-upmanship, there was also a deep appreciation and respect for the medium in general, even when faced with genres they didn't get on with. They also spent a hell of a lot of time on music, even when not on the clock. I don't get that sense from video game journalism at all; if anything several of them seem to wish they were movie critics. The depth of detailed technical knowledge just isn't there - music and film journalists throw light both on the techniques used to make music and film, and the process of production itself, in a way that video game reporting doesn't.
How representative it is of the overall picture I can't say. I would imagine that Telltale's style of games sell more on phones/tablets and on consoles, but of course the sales on those platforms may well show the same trends over time.
But of course, names don't tell the full picture, and even major brands can sell poorly if the product isn't interesting/great (like many later Telltale titles).
I don’t excuse management for a second; they must have known the coffers were bare while they were still hiring.
After that the money goes to other instances (like the loan by the bank etc).
EDIT: They are paid out their outstanding wage for their performed work, not to the end of their contracts
Is it just that games companies suffering the same fate get more coverage in the media, or is it something about game studios that seem to make them more likely to crash and burn like this?
I know that games are quite consumer's-whim-driven and you're never really sure if you've got a hit on your hands or not until you release. I guess it is the same for movies, yet I've never heard of any movies spectacuarly just going bust half-way through filming and just abandonning what they are doing and packing it in (although I have heard of some near-misses). Yet it seems to happen a lot for games comapanies?
What gives?
P.S. sucks for the people working on this. Hope you all find something new!
The interesting part is that Hollywood is dealing with a cycle of this sort of suffering currently with Special Effects houses. The CG special effects companies are often contracted for only a single set piece at a time in a movie, as companies they currently last about at most 2 years and involvement in scenes in two and a half films, and there is a lot of employee anguish because a lot of the artists involved have generally not been allowed to unionize (or heavily discouraged from unionizing), especially in the smaller contractors. Most of the Oscars presented for Best Special Effects in the last few years have involved at least one firm that was dead by the time of the Oscars award. It's not making the news as much as game studio suffering, but it's a similar problem in that both industries feel that they can afford to burn through talent cheaper than it takes to protect it, as there are always excitable young kids happy to get their shot in Hollywood or Videogames.
To be honest a company that can “barely keep its head above water” wont be in shape to provide a lot of support. That is kind of the point, if they could do that then maybe they could keep the company afloat which is a bit paradoxical.
It would be nice situations like these to have some form of safety net in form of financial aid or something. I have no idea what they do in the US but in Sweden you can get a lot of help since these things happen with companies from time to time.
How fungible are game dev skills? At least folks are getting released into a hot tech market.
That depends on the role taken. Artists are fairly fungible (probably unfairly) because they can be shown a bunch of examples and told "make something that fits with this". Coders are fungible only if you're comparing wizard-level coders who can read, understand and fix / improve a game's codebase.
The games industry preys on young ppl who don't know what a healthy work/life balance looks like. The pay is lower because employees are passionate. Passion doesn't pay rent. It doesn't provide stability for your partner and children who all will suffer because you chose to work in games.
Your passion will be compromised endlessly by marketing and management who can air drop in and change a game's entire direction in one meeting. Because they saw a Minecraft commercial and their kid responded to it. They'll make you work weekend after weekend to fit their pivot into the original schedule and stop in for an hour to drop off donuts. Oh good, eight hours of work for a donut. Donuts also don't pay rent. They don't fix your marital problems.
Games is an industry stuck in a groundhog day loop of misery. This is my warning to anyone who thinks they like games enough to make them. You won't like them after making them. It isn't worth it.
Yeah there are great companies but considering that just this year alone there were over 1,000 layoffs [1] in an industry that there are just a handful of large developers / publishers it's hard to get a position where you aren't just churning out gambling apps or one off VR projects for a Big Media Company trying to make a quick buck.
The issue is that video games are entertainment and the industry is built off the back of exploited workers that are genuinely passionate but have no resources outside of becoming indie (which is basically rolling the dice) or just using their talents elsewhere.
[1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...
While making games is a great way to learn programming, and is a lot of fun, the working conditions make it an untenable career choice for most.
Or, take the risk and go indie - effectively a lottery ticket.
Do it for fun if you want, but doing it for the money will lead to heartbreak.
The hobby project route is pretty much the only way.
Ouch. That really puts things into perspective said like that.
At least it'd be good practice for building casinos for non-children. Slot machine development uses a lot of the same skills (and often the same stack; IGT uses C# and Unity3D for their slot machines if their jobs postings are anything to go by).
http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com
But then again, I am aware that most studios are not like that.
Sometimes I really hate living in the US. -_-
For many of us who fell into the other 98% the statistics aren't in your favor and some of the bigger publishers(EA, Microsoft) tend to go in ~6 year cycles.
Had a friend who worked on Dead Space, which should have been a stable thing. Alas, Visceral isn't around either.
I'm sorry but: fuck that shit.
When I was in that industry I worked 8am-6pm because I was able to be more productive when the office was empty than being some night owl who stayed in the office till 2am.
I caught no end of shit because I was "walking out the door at 6pm". People weren't blocked, I wasn't leaving anyone in a state where they couldn't do work.
God forbid I wanted to spend a bit of time with my wife(then GF, I can't believe she put up with it). There's some interesting technical problems in that industry but it's not worth the hell you go through for the rest of it. Saw 3 divorces on my last team before I got out and that was all I needed to know that it wasn't a healthy industry to be in.
Read the glassdoor reviews very carefully.
Look at the new Assassin’s Creed game, which is a reskin of Origins, plus a dozen pages of “buy this shit!” The xp system is rigged to make it a slog and a grind unless you buy “boosts” and it’s a giant map filled with what amount to chores. I feel badly for kids who grow up thinking that skinner boxes connected to a publisher’s bank account are what games have to be, but I’m not touching that stuff.
Meanwhile there are great mid-tier games, indie games, and the very occasional AAA effort that doesn’t punish the player for playing. It only really gets hard when something like CDPR makes great games that don’t monetize outrageously, but also famously treat their employees like dirt.
Not that this is necessarily bad, Ubisoft has gotten really good at building these sorts of open world games, and the market seems to agree that having minor changes to the same formula is a good approach.
Things used to be almost as bad in the software dev industry as a whole several decades back, except software dev moved on and got (a little) better. Additionally, a lot of those folks back then had substantial equity, whereas that's really not the case in GameDev today. There's an endless supply of disposable workers today, and that takes a lot of pressure off the industry to do better. Some places do better, but mostly through their own volition. And, unfortunately, such places are all too rare.
No? Manager start doing this when their profits dwindle, not when the company has no cash left. The basic idea is to get one or two more bonus checks while the others lose their homes. You can be sure that some people still made a profit.
> “[Hawley] came into a situation where the staff needed a strong leader with a clear vision,” says a former employee.
Does anybody remember how Dunder Miflin tried to pursuade the stockholders by presenting Michael Scott as the hero who would turn things around?
And one thing I don't really get is why one brings oneself in a situation where one works ones ass off in exchange for living paycheck-to-paycheck. You should have a decent amount of spare time (or time for personal projects at least) and turn a profit, otherwise why work this job at all? I mean gaming industry is not a career you work in because you need to feed 3 children and don't have another choice.
What retribution? They were fired with no severance or time to prepare. Why don't they just speak out against the company that doesn't exist anymore and left them on the street?
The gaming industry is a tough place to be. I have so much respect for game designers, 3D artists, animators. Because it takes a lot of time, skill, rendering and sleepless nights to get something good out. Unfortunately, most game companies are controlled by mediocre people at the top, who run things like a sweatshop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061453
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066920
More pressure should be put on those mega-corporations to reduce the commissions they charge developers who release games on their platforms - currently 30%.
The consoles are not supercomputers anymore like the PS3, they mostly use off the shelf (AMD) hardware and x86 architecture. Soon they will just stream the game directly to a thin client which will only handle time-sensitive calculations like input and collision. On PC this 30% commission is even less justifiable since the platform is open and there is no hardware for Valve to get involved with.
Cutting this commission would immediately put money into the hands of games studios and improve conditions for workers, whilst still leaving the platform holders ridiculously profitable. Its a shame no one has been first to move on this - Microsoft with Xbox would seem a good candidate given their desperation to attract devs to the platform and away from PS4/Sony.
I think Telltale is just classic bad management. Not much different from other industries. I think the industry can make for a good career - find a small-ish studio with a string of successful releases and low overhead (no crappy legacy engine to maintain, cheap location).