Good Bye, Clementine

September 21, 2018 5:16 PM

Pioneering narrative game studio Telltale Games has laid off the vast majority of its employees today and is expected to close entirely.

Founded by former Lucasarts employees, Telltale found breakthrough success with The Walking Dead. The studio unfortunately also developed what many found to be a toxic workplace culture, with much of the writing talent behind The Walking Dead S1 leaving the company to form Campo Santo (now itself part of Valve).

Telltale was also plagued by aging technology, and recently a lawsuit from their former CEO. If third party tools are to be believed, their games also have failed to sell at anything like their prior levels of late.

The only game expected to be completed is Minecraft Story Mode, leaving the final season of The Walking Dead in limbo.

posted by selfnoise (35 comments total)

I've heard good things about some of these games, though they aren't very accessible for my purposes.

.
posted by Alensin at 5:29 PM on September 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've wanted to play the Sam & Max games of theirs, but never found the time.
posted by SansPoint at 5:31 PM on September 21, 2018

According to reports the final season of The Walking Dead won't be finished. The Minecraft Story Mode that a few are sticking around to finish seems like it's going to be an interactive video like some of the others that have shown up on Netflix.

I played several of Telltale's games, none of them ever lived up to the promise of the first Walking Dead game. It was pretty obvious at the time they were expanding too fast and wooing companies to license their IP for games with promised low production costs. Not surprising to hear this led directly into a toxic work environment, which of course caused all the best talent to leave. Telltale destroyed itself pretty thoroughly and left behind a cautionary tale that will nevertheless be repeated again by someone else.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:00 PM on September 21, 2018 [19 favorites]

Oh also none of the 225 people laid off are getting a dime for severance, which points to what ought to be a criminal level of incompetence and mismanagement.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:05 PM on September 21, 2018 [36 favorites]

My favourite Telltale game was the Borderlands one - I like the setting and the humour and since I'm not a big FPS player, it was a good way to experience that world.

I tried the Batman game next. There were parts of it that were just sloppy and not well thought out. Bruce Wayne is Batman. And Harvey Dent was clearly rendered to be taller and wider-chested than Bruce. As in, if Batman is a very athletic 6'3", then Harvey was LeBron-esque is stature. And then Harvey gave a press conference where he walked away from the microphones and just started speaking at the edge of the stage? It all just felt rushed and slapped together and lacking in polish. Add in the fact that the engine never ran that well and it got easier and easier to see how things were falling apart.
posted by thecjm at 6:20 PM on September 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oh also none of the 225 people laid off are getting a dime for severance, which points to what ought to be a criminal level of incompetence and mismanagement.

There are some people in certain industries who think they are bulletproof as they play Russian roulette. It's horrible.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 6:38 PM on September 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

A former coworker told me the wages they offered were pitiful even for pre-2012 SF Bay Area housing prices. At 2018 Bay housing prices you'd be taking a loss.
posted by JauntyFedora at 6:38 PM on September 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

Dammit. I was still holding out hope for The Wolf Among Us season 2. I know I can just read the comics if I want more Bigby Wolf, but god, he looks like a potato.
posted by brook horse at 6:50 PM on September 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

They had a wonderful pair of Texas hold'em games. Or at least the second one was; the first one would never run on my Mac despite exceeding the specs, steam wouldn't give a refund unless Telltale authorized it, and they never responded to any inquiries...and then I found scads of other people in forums with the same problem, equally ignored by Telltale, yet Telltale kept right on selling this broken game to Mac users.
posted by davejay at 7:37 PM on September 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Man... if you can't make money with that roster of licenses, you oughta get outta the money-making business.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 7:43 PM on September 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

TWD S1 was a masterpiece, but the guys responsible left to found Campo Santo and make Firewatch (and they were then acquired by Valve), so you never got that caliber of innovation again.

I was such a fan of the company because of TWD, but nothing they made again even came close to the promise they once had. That includes the Fables and Borderlands games, which are some of their better post-Walking Dead output. I loathed the seasons of The Walking Dead after the first. They should have left Clementine's story alone.

I miss the purity and humor of their pre-WD adventure games like Sam and Max and Strongbad.
posted by painquale at 9:08 PM on September 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

Man... if you can't make money with that roster of licenses, you oughta get outta the money-making business.

Which is part of the problem. Spending a fortune on IP rights and licenses, dumping the jobs on extremely overworked devs, and then after the first season of Walking Dead they just didn't make money on anything.

By all accounts an awful place to work, with absolutely atrocious management.
posted by kafziel at 11:11 PM on September 21, 2018

Telltale destroyed itself pretty thoroughly and left behind a cautionary tale that will nevertheless be repeated again by someone else.

Because the video game industry has a learning curve with a negative slope.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:46 PM on September 21, 2018 [9 favorites]

I don't follow much gaming stuff, but they've been in my vague awareness for a while because, hey, adventure games. But I wasn't terribly impressed with what little I played, and the art style always struck me as unappealing. Oh well.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:57 PM on September 21, 2018

What a horror show. Former co-worker wrote that it was “oh you’re here. Good morning. Get your personal stuff and get out”.
posted by lemon_icing at 1:26 AM on September 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

The "no severance" thing is especially scummy. They really couldn't have fired everyone 2 weeks ago, with 2 weeks salary?

They had so many titles that it was a surprise (to me) that they were closing. It must really have been a shitstorm of bad management to mess up so many games that should have gone well.

I pretty much liked their Sam & Max games, though not as much as the LucasArts one. I bounced hard off the Borderlands one— it barely seemed like a game at all.
posted by zompist at 1:44 AM on September 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I read on Twitter about how the poster's friend's fiance had just quit Microsoft and went into the office to get a check and unemployment instructions.
posted by Samizdata at 1:45 AM on September 22, 2018

> SansPoint:
"I've wanted to play the Sam & Max games of theirs, but never found the time."

I had the very first release on DVD. It had a game breaker bug.
posted by Samizdata at 1:47 AM on September 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Here's the tweet I cited. (Didn't think I could find it again, but had a tab open with it.)
posted by Samizdata at 1:52 AM on September 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

People want stories in games, and TWD had a great one. The current trend is to having that stoeyy play out through a "walking simulator"* though and they never pivoted, just kept doing the exact same thing that made them money once, but with a different franchise attached.

*Hate that term
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:33 AM on September 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Someday I hope someone else picks up the ball on another Back to the Future game. That was amazing.
posted by broken wheelchair at 5:35 AM on September 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

The Strong Bad games are one of the best adaptations of a whatever-Homestar-Runner-is to video games in the history of video games. Every bit as funny and bizarre and inventive as the Strong Bad videos.

"Why don't we do an entire episode where Strong Bad is mostly in character filming a homemade detective movie and all the other characters are participating with idiosyncratically varying degrees of consent and comprehension?"
posted by straight at 6:42 AM on September 22, 2018 [9 favorites]

The "no severance" thing is especially scummy

I see what you did there.
posted by davejay at 7:56 AM on September 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

They got a lukewarm reception, but their early games - the Sam & Max and Monkey Island reboots - I really enjoyed, almost entirely because nobody was doing anything like that any more, and I wanted to visit those characters and that sense of humour again. It's so absolutely shitty that mismanagement of the company leads to the people who only ever worked to make the best thing that they could getting the shaft.
posted by parm at 10:51 AM on September 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

A bit of a tangent, but are there any non-indie A-AAA studios that don't treat their employees terribly?

It seems like every studio starts to suck in a variety of ways once they reach a certain size. I get that games are often going to involve some need for "crunch" time to hit certain release days, and that crunching can lead to a bunch of bad workplace behaviors, but it seems like every major studio that lasts long enough morphs that into just being straight-up abusive towards employees. Sometimes it's done with a smile and claims that we're "all in this together" (only how many C-levels are there on Sunday night?), other times it's more blatant (e.g. "EA spouse"'s expose many years back.) It just seems like some unwritten law of game economics that if you get to A/AAA status, eventually you will become a terrible place to work.

(I was gonna say Valve is the counter-example, but 1) I've heard a couple sources on why it's not the sunshine meritocracy that people claim 2) they're still tiny compared to some of the large studios, plus they're technically independent.)
posted by -1 at 11:19 AM on September 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

Man, I have all their early, pre walking dead stuff. Somewhere, I burned them all to CD. I wonder if I can still download them from the company before they go away forever.

This is sad, I had such great hopes for Telltale.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:40 PM on September 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh also none of the 225 people laid off are getting a dime for severance, which points to what ought to be a criminal level of incompetence and mismanagement.

Sounds like a WARN Act violation.
posted by enn at 7:35 PM on September 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

It seems to have been an extraordinary level of scumminess, even for the games industry. Multiple people hired within the last week, including people who moved across country for their new job, when they knew they were closing. Presumably the CEO gained some personal financial advantage by pretending they weren't going to go under, at the cost of wrecking other people's lives.
posted by tavella at 7:43 PM on September 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

It's been so disheartening to hear takes from gamers like, "Well, their games were bad anyway," or "Now I'll never find out what happens to [fictional character]!" As the industry moves towards unionization and fighting for some decent treatment, you'd think the consumers of these things would be more supportive of the people who make them.
posted by davejh at 8:24 PM on September 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

While a union would have improved the lives of employees while the company was doing well, I don't think it would have stopped the company from going bankrupt, or addressed the underlying issue that in our wonderful capitalist system every game studio is basically one flop away from bankruptcy. And also, is a 300-person studio that cranks out unambitious movie tie-ins (because they seem 'safe') really a desirable allocation of labor that we should try to protect? When I imagine a better society, I think it would have something more like 30 studios of ten people rather than one studio of 300, and sufficiently strong social safety nets that a ten person studio could afford to take risks.
posted by Pyry at 8:47 PM on September 22, 2018

Pyry, it's funny but that sounds a lot like the pharmaceutical industry in a lot of important ways - constant hiring/firing churn, being one flop away from folding, pressure to go after "safe" iterations on existing drugs as opposed to incentives to solve new problems, etc.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:50 PM on September 23, 2018

Game Workers Unite statement on Telltale layoffs

Profiles on Game Workers Unite from March: Labor unions were top of mind for creators at this year’s Game Developers Conference

This is the group using GDC to bolster game studio unionization efforts
posted by nicebookrack at 9:12 PM on September 23, 2018

I work as a game designer, and my colleagues have been talking a lot about TellTale. Here's the gist:
1) Yup, studios fold all the time
2) Holy moly TellTale was *awful,* even by industry standards

To answer an earlier question, yes, there are some studios which are great, across the entire "A" spectrum. You don't hear about them because they don't make the news, and it's awkward for individuals to say "Well I'm doing great. We have very low turnover. Sorry, no openings."

That said, job insecurity is a way of life: my bosses are great, I work normal hours, but if the studio went under tomorrow, I wouldn't be shocked.

When my spouse and I plan our finances, I always say "we'll follow *your* jobs. Pretend I'm an actor. What I do is fun, but it could end at any moment."
posted by ®@ at 8:31 AM on September 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

This article from Shamus Young may be of interest.

It's the chart at the end that's the killer, though. Literally. They had one massive hit (The Walking Dead with over 3.5 million copies), and then a few million-sellers: Wolf Among Us, Walking Dead 2, and Tales from the Borderlands. Since then— for four years— every title has sold less than the last; it looks like the latest releases are at the 100,000 level.

I'm guessing the suits said "Our games now sell 3 million copies and we're going to budget based on that!" And that was, y'know, a poor decision.
posted by zompist at 2:03 PM on September 28, 2018

Capitalist present, collective future: Labor in Night in the Woods and Tacoma (Major spoilers for Tacoma and minor spoilers for Night in the Woods follow in Jacob Geller’s look at the employee’s sometimes unenviable lot – both inside and outside of videogames.)
posted by homunculus at 11:47 AM on October 13, 2018