9 ms·

Telltale Autopsy

126 points by smacktoward 8y ago

faitswulff 8y ago
"This Dumb Industry" is such a good name for this series of blog posts [0]. I always tell people game development is both the hardest and least (extrinsically) rewarding programming career you could pick: volatile, driven by personalities, low paying, with hard engineering problems. [0]: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+industry https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+ind...
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  Working on video games is a lot like being in a band after High School. You shouldn't do it with an expectation of any great rewards. You should really only do it if you are so passionate about the field that you don't have a choice. Because of the high number of passionate people in the field the risk/reward ratio will always be skewed against you and most people will not be properly compensated for their work.
  - YinglingLight 8y ago
    From personal experience I'd say services like Patreon/Kickstarter has made it easier to scratch a living as a Creative than ever before. There's 7.4 billion people on the planet. Make a fraction of 0.000001% enamored with your Creative product (be it yourself as an entertainer, your book series, your erotic app game, whatever), and you can hold your own.
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      While I agree with your larger point, I think you'd still be scraping by (if that) with only 75 fans
      - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
        Do you mean 750 fans?
        wlesieutre 8y ago
        I mean 0.000001% of 7.5 billion is 75, and that you'd really need a bigger percent of the world population than that. Pretty sure I have the math right.
    - chokma 8y ago
      Sounds like the "1000 true fans" concept - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ - i.e., you "just" need a 1000 people who are willing to pay a net 100$ / year for what you create.
      - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
        From a marketers perspective... that's not as easy as it looks. To get 1,000 True Fans to commit we probably need to expose the product to 50,000 "True Fans". Hoping for a 2% conversion rate. To reach 50,000 True Fans we will probably have to create awareness with a larger group of potential True Fans that have a strong connection to your Fandom, maybe 500,000. To reach 1/2 a million people you are going to have to get well beyond a few posts to your niche subeditors or making the front page on Hacker News. If you come up with some great advertisements and eventually starting landing your $100 per year True Fans, it might end up costing you $20 each to find them. Not a huge problem... assuming you can do it. It's tough because in addition to coding your own app you now had to learn how to be a pretty decent user of AdSense or Facebook Ads. That is very possible, but it does eat into the time you have to work on your core business. And now you need another 200 fans to pay for the ads you have been buying.
        seventhtiger 8y ago
        If you double your conversion rate, you halve the needed audience size. If you target a niche with a competent product, you will not need massive reach to the general audience. Gaming is a rich medium with many underserved communities that would love to pay for what they like.
- tdsamardzhiev 8y ago
  True, true and true. Yet, I can't see myself doing anything else.
forkLding 8y ago
Although a lot of the commentary and criticism from people is the bad culture but I really think this was a secondary problem, after all bad culture from the top (autocratic behaviour plus harsh deadlines?) might not kill you. (Apple, Tesla, etc.) But it would seem the most important aspect is really the declining sales every year that could likely be due to business decisions from the top or simply a cash management issue where the cash at hand was not getting replenished at hand fast enough which again could be a business decision gone wrong based on overly positive sales expectations.
- ido 8y ago
  The article starts off saying it was probably both: "A company where the president picks dumb products, wastes money, and hires unqualified losers is dysfunctional. A company where the president builds a cult of personality, fires people who criticize him, and hires unqualified friends / relatives is toxic. After reading The Verge article, it sounds like Telltale suffered from both problems. They were dysfunctional in the traditional sense of making lousy business decisions, but they were also dysfunctional in the more specific sense of being run by one or more jerks." Maybe Apple managed to survive (thrive!) despite of the jerk, but that doesn't mean one wouldn't bring down a company on a less robust standing that may have otherwise still managed to keep the right trajectory.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    > Maybe Apple managed to survive (thrive!) despite of the jerk Perhaps Apple survived because the jerk was doing a good job where he was, despite being a jerk?
    - ido 8y ago
      He may have not been a complete jerk, or the same type of jerk. Maybe he only wasn't nice to people but didn't hire his incompetent friends, etc. Maybe he was so good at other stuff that a negative jerk effect was not enough to offset the positive parts. But my point was that according to the definition given in the article I don't think you can say "the jerk effect" was zero at TT, I think the author made a convincing argument.
phendrenad2 8y ago
(Sort of a tangent, but it is called out in the article...) Why DO companies insist on starting out in the bay area? Is it really that hard to find talent in second-string tech hubs?
- Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  The answer I keep hearing is that it keeps the founders near the VC money, which doesn't make sense here as I don't believe Telltale was pursuing that. I've always wondered how much cash Double Fine burns through to stay in SF.
  - chaosite 8y ago
    Telltale was VC funded. https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/53723-08 https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/53723-08
  - TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
    > I've always wondered how much cash Double Fine burns through to stay in SF The documentary on Double Fine releasing Broken Age sort of touches on this as it chronicles the journey from idea, kickstarter, development, and release. In there there were some small layoffs or needing to shift people to bring in more money. Tim goes through some visual changes as well as the stress mounts.
- ARothfusz 8y ago
  I've always imagined it was because the VCs bought the buildings they rent out to the startups, and probably the apartments as well. That makes the bay area a big money laundering machine where cash is guaranteed to flow from the investors through the VCs to the startups and back to the VCs again. Cha-ching!
  - lucisferre 8y ago
    I don't believe that is what money laundering means.
carapace 8y ago
> Frankly, if I was an investor I’d refuse to give my money to any ninny who wanted to set up shop in any of the overcrowded, overpriced tech hubs. I've wondered about this, VC's aren't stupid, what's the disconnect? If I were starting a company in CA I'd go to Davis. (FWIW)
- dilyevsky 8y ago
  Yes VCs aren’t stupid (well mostly) - they know you won’t be able to hire as many similarly talented/experienced people in Atlanta. Want to hire some ex-faang empoyee? Fogetaboutit. And what’s in Davis? For all intents and purposes it’s just more expensive Atlanta
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > Yes VCs aren’t stupid (well mostly) - they know you won’t be able to hire as many similarly talented/experienced people in Atlanta. Considering all the "talent shortage" whining, it doesn't seem like they can find many in the Bay Area either. > Want to hire some ex-faang empoyee? Fogetaboutit. Most startups should fogetaboutit anyway. They don't need ex-FAANG employees, will waste precious runway hiring them for little marginal gain, and will be hard-pressed to give them all meaningful work to do (leading to spending even more money in short order to replace them).
    - dilyevsky 8y ago
      The shortage in the sfba is of different kind - too much competition. So all you have to do is to offer larger pay or something non-monetary like career opportunity and you got yourself a great engineer. In some other locales it could legitimately be shortage of qualified staff. To your second point, faang employees are much more likely to pass any interview process (based on my extensive interviewing experience at my current gig) so you’re saving money on recruiting at least.
  - carapace 8y ago
    > you won’t be able to hire as many similarly talented/experienced people But we're talking about starting a company. Typically you'll already have a technical co-founder or someone, no? If you grow you can grow to SF. Has no VC ever asked, "Would you be willing to relocate to <CHEAPER CITY> for two years?" > And what’s in Davis? UC Davis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davi... > In 2006, Davis was ranked as the second most educated city (in terms of the percentage of residents with graduate degrees) in the US by CNN Money Magazine... ~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California Have you been there? It's nice. :-) It's close to the Bay Area and has lower costs and UC Davis. (And you don't have to put up with the constant cold winds! It's toasty there all year 'round!)
Apocryphon 8y ago
The video games industry is where we consistently hear some of the worst stories of workers being mistreated and lied to under dysfunctional management in toxic cultures. Constant crunch time for games that don't even succeed in the market. What would anti-union libertarians say about the labor conditions there? Workers should just avoid the game industry until more tolerable and better-paying workplaces arise? How is organizing workers not a valid solution to the problems there? Do they think that unions will somehow make the situation worse?
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  I've had several anti-union libertarian coworkers in the video game industry, each one thought they are exceptional so they don't need a union and they trust their choices/negotiation skills - to be fair probably everyone in game industry has a robust opinion of themselves.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  A part of the reason you hear these stories of the games industry is that it's a desirable job for many people. Games companies can get away with more than some other software companies because enough people want to work on games despite worse employment conditions than they might find with the same skill set elsewhere. There's a supply and demand issue. There's also a certain amount of self imposed crunch by people who are genuinely passionate about the game they're working on and don't have as many other demands on their time due to family or other outside interests or commitments. To the extent that unions improve worker conditions, they do so in part by restricting entry and thus influencing the supply side. In general unions tend to benefit people already in the industry at the expense of people outside who'd like to join, among other groups. Whether that's a desirable outcome depends on large part to which group you either belong or care about the most.
- mrfredward 8y ago
  Collective bargaining relies on negotiating blanket policies for all the workers. In some industries, that is fine. If all your brick layers get paid the same and given the same breaks, and all your brick-laying supervisors get their standard supervisor pay, that might be for the better. It doesn't work that way for knowledge workers and creative types. Some people are rare talents, some people are just okay. Some people fill wear 5 different hats and cover responsibilities outside their title. One artist may be the visionary behind your greatest success, another just follows orders, but both are on the same team and at the same level of the hierarchy. If you force a system where everyone makes the same salary based on how long they've worked there, the best people will leave. But if people negotiate for themselves, it isn't collective bargaining anymore, and you don't have a union. Want to prevent burnout? The union negotiates for rigid 9 to 5 hours. Many creative people will hate it. Or you let people come in when the want, but they have to fill out a timesheet, can't work overtime without the approval of both a manager and a union rep, and have to adhere to rigid guidelines. Unions can't work without bureaucracy, but creative people and creative organizations don't work well with bureaucracy.
bliblah 8y ago
I followed Telltales quite a bit before they went out of business, I even know a few people that worked/applied to work there. For me there were always red flags, they tried too hard to chase the dragon after the unexpected success of TWD, all of the sudden they were churning out 2-3 titles a year (17 individual episodes were released in 2017 alone) with an aging engine. They were constantly missing out release dates for episodes and unable to update their games for new experiences. Also do not forget that licences for these properties are very expensive to procure making it even more difficult to break even. They also added an Exec from Zynga as their CEO in 2017, which for me represent the very worst gaming has to offer in terms of low effort, exploitable gaming. This was the final nail in the coffin, unsustainable business practices with high level execs who only care about the bottom line always breeds failure. Its a shame, a lot of people knew the end was coming but management kept quiet until they literally had to close up shop and gave people a few hours to leave the building. All the workers there deserve better.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  >>they tried too hard to chase the dragon What does this phrase mean? A google search game me results about heroin use which I don't think that that's what you meant.
  - bliblah 8y ago
    In this case it means that they used too many resources to recreate their previous success, which happened to be fleeting.
  - Topgamer7 8y ago
    It's analogous to the heroin reference. Basically as a company they were chasing that high from TWD's success in an unsustainable, detrimental manner.
- debacle 8y ago
  I listened to a podcast yesterday by someone whose friend was let go from Telltale. The key points seem to be: - Really bad (one sided) deals on IP. - Taking on more than they can chew. - A domino effect of failures. - Failing to adapt. It sounds like basically everyone saw the writing on the wall, but no one expected the end to be so inhumane.
derefr 8y ago
> trends like online shooters, Battle Royale games, loot boxes, or any of the other fads that have pulled teams off course with the false promise of easy money Citation? Because I always thought that game studios switched to these because they were “easy money”, not because they were fads. Critics and journalists disliking a thing is different than it not being a successful strategy.
- GW150914 8y ago
  In the Battle Royals space the place is littered with the corpses of devs and publishers who kept on the fad. PUBG got there first, and then FortNite leapfrogged them, and to be blunt all of other attempts are names with little or no recognition. Remember The Culling II? Yeah, neither do I. And I don’t remember the dozens of other games that have tried to copy the formula and never even got the trivial recognition of something like Radical Heights, which killed its publisher Boss Key. Fade in games go something like this: a workable formula makes someone a lot of money. They rise and at a certain thresholds major publishers take note and iterate, crushing the original. Then other publishers inject said mechanics into their flagship games until people are so sick of them that they can’t stand it. There is a reason why all of the big upcoming shooters like CoD IV have battle royale modes. To a lesser extent fads can burn out without studios ever really getting into it because it’s too small (relatively speaking of course). Surgeon Simulator set of years of “simulator” games ranging from I Am Bread to Black Screen Simulator. Eventually we got Shower With Your Dad Simulator which subverted the genre a bit, and set of another explosion of imitation. These indie fads tend to follow that pattern of initial massive explosion followed by secondary ignition when some slight twist on the formula introduces some air to the. mixture, and this repeats with smaller explosions until the last dregs of fuel are exhausted. Zombie modes are another example, as are hero shooters like OverWatch (the “big thing” before BR). Remember LawBreakers? Exactly. https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-trying-and-failing-compete/16712 https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-try... What we’re seeing now with BR as it played out last cycle.
madrox 8y ago
I would summarize it more simply as a failure of business to manage their money. Ed Catmull calls it "Feeding the Beast." They tried to turn interactive narrative into a factory that cranked out new titles. It's a shame. I haven't connected with stories in video games for a while. I still long for the emotional depth of Mass Effect and TWAU. Telltale was one of the good ones.
itsdrewmiller 8y ago
How did telltale have 90 developers to lay off in 2017? Wasn't their bread and butter a pretty simple quicktime event engine and their differentiator storytelling?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

126 points by smacktoward 8y ago

"This Dumb Industry" is such a good name for this series of blog posts [0]. I always tell people game development is both the hardest and least (extrinsically) rewarding programming career you could pick: volatile, driven by personalities, low paying, with hard engineering problems. [0]: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+industry https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+ind...

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
Working on video games is a lot like being in a band after High School. You shouldn't do it with an expectation of any great rewards. You should really only do it if you are so passionate about the field that you don't have a choice. Because of the high number of passionate people in the field the risk/reward ratio will always be skewed against you and most people will not be properly compensated for their work.
- YinglingLight 8y ago
  From personal experience I'd say services like Patreon/Kickstarter has made it easier to scratch a living as a Creative than ever before. There's 7.4 billion people on the planet. Make a fraction of 0.000001% enamored with your Creative product (be it yourself as an entertainer, your book series, your erotic app game, whatever), and you can hold your own.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    While I agree with your larger point, I think you'd still be scraping by (if that) with only 75 fans
    - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
      Do you mean 750 fans?
      - wlesieutre 8y ago
        I mean 0.000001% of 7.5 billion is 75, and that you'd really need a bigger percent of the world population than that. Pretty sure I have the math right.
  - chokma 8y ago
    Sounds like the "1000 true fans" concept - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ - i.e., you "just" need a 1000 people who are willing to pay a net 100$ / year for what you create.
    - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
      From a marketers perspective... that's not as easy as it looks. To get 1,000 True Fans to commit we probably need to expose the product to 50,000 "True Fans". Hoping for a 2% conversion rate. To reach 50,000 True Fans we will probably have to create awareness with a larger group of potential True Fans that have a strong connection to your Fandom, maybe 500,000. To reach 1/2 a million people you are going to have to get well beyond a few posts to your niche subeditors or making the front page on Hacker News. If you come up with some great advertisements and eventually starting landing your $100 per year True Fans, it might end up costing you $20 each to find them. Not a huge problem... assuming you can do it. It's tough because in addition to coding your own app you now had to learn how to be a pretty decent user of AdSense or Facebook Ads. That is very possible, but it does eat into the time you have to work on your core business. And now you need another 200 fans to pay for the ads you have been buying.
      - seventhtiger 8y ago
        If you double your conversion rate, you halve the needed audience size. If you target a niche with a competent product, you will not need massive reach to the general audience. Gaming is a rich medium with many underserved communities that would love to pay for what they like.
tdsamardzhiev 8y ago
True, true and true. Yet, I can't see myself doing anything else.

forkLding 8y ago

Although a lot of the commentary and criticism from people is the bad culture but I really think this was a secondary problem, after all bad culture from the top (autocratic behaviour plus harsh deadlines?) might not kill you. (Apple, Tesla, etc.) But it would seem the most important aspect is really the declining sales every year that could likely be due to business decisions from the top or simply a cash management issue where the cash at hand was not getting replenished at hand fast enough which again could be a business decision gone wrong based on overly positive sales expectations.

ido 8y ago
The article starts off saying it was probably both: "A company where the president picks dumb products, wastes money, and hires unqualified losers is dysfunctional. A company where the president builds a cult of personality, fires people who criticize him, and hires unqualified friends / relatives is toxic. After reading The Verge article, it sounds like Telltale suffered from both problems. They were dysfunctional in the traditional sense of making lousy business decisions, but they were also dysfunctional in the more specific sense of being run by one or more jerks." Maybe Apple managed to survive (thrive!) despite of the jerk, but that doesn't mean one wouldn't bring down a company on a less robust standing that may have otherwise still managed to keep the right trajectory.
- baud147258 8y ago
  > Maybe Apple managed to survive (thrive!) despite of the jerk Perhaps Apple survived because the jerk was doing a good job where he was, despite being a jerk?
  - ido 8y ago
    He may have not been a complete jerk, or the same type of jerk. Maybe he only wasn't nice to people but didn't hire his incompetent friends, etc. Maybe he was so good at other stuff that a negative jerk effect was not enough to offset the positive parts. But my point was that according to the definition given in the article I don't think you can say "the jerk effect" was zero at TT, I think the author made a convincing argument.

phendrenad2 8y ago

(Sort of a tangent, but it is called out in the article...) Why DO companies insist on starting out in the bay area? Is it really that hard to find talent in second-string tech hubs?

Eric_WVGG 8y ago
The answer I keep hearing is that it keeps the founders near the VC money, which doesn't make sense here as I don't believe Telltale was pursuing that. I've always wondered how much cash Double Fine burns through to stay in SF.
- chaosite 8y ago
  Telltale was VC funded. https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/53723-08 https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/53723-08
- TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
  > I've always wondered how much cash Double Fine burns through to stay in SF The documentary on Double Fine releasing Broken Age sort of touches on this as it chronicles the journey from idea, kickstarter, development, and release. In there there were some small layoffs or needing to shift people to bring in more money. Tim goes through some visual changes as well as the stress mounts.
ARothfusz 8y ago
I've always imagined it was because the VCs bought the buildings they rent out to the startups, and probably the apartments as well. That makes the bay area a big money laundering machine where cash is guaranteed to flow from the investors through the VCs to the startups and back to the VCs again. Cha-ching!
- lucisferre 8y ago
  I don't believe that is what money laundering means.

carapace 8y ago

> Frankly, if I was an investor I’d refuse to give my money to any ninny who wanted to set up shop in any of the overcrowded, overpriced tech hubs. I've wondered about this, VC's aren't stupid, what's the disconnect? If I were starting a company in CA I'd go to Davis. (FWIW)

dilyevsky 8y ago
Yes VCs aren’t stupid (well mostly) - they know you won’t be able to hire as many similarly talented/experienced people in Atlanta. Want to hire some ex-faang empoyee? Fogetaboutit. And what’s in Davis? For all intents and purposes it’s just more expensive Atlanta
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > Yes VCs aren’t stupid (well mostly) - they know you won’t be able to hire as many similarly talented/experienced people in Atlanta. Considering all the "talent shortage" whining, it doesn't seem like they can find many in the Bay Area either. > Want to hire some ex-faang empoyee? Fogetaboutit. Most startups should fogetaboutit anyway. They don't need ex-FAANG employees, will waste precious runway hiring them for little marginal gain, and will be hard-pressed to give them all meaningful work to do (leading to spending even more money in short order to replace them).
  - dilyevsky 8y ago
    The shortage in the sfba is of different kind - too much competition. So all you have to do is to offer larger pay or something non-monetary like career opportunity and you got yourself a great engineer. In some other locales it could legitimately be shortage of qualified staff. To your second point, faang employees are much more likely to pass any interview process (based on my extensive interviewing experience at my current gig) so you’re saving money on recruiting at least.
- carapace 8y ago
  > you won’t be able to hire as many similarly talented/experienced people But we're talking about starting a company. Typically you'll already have a technical co-founder or someone, no? If you grow you can grow to SF. Has no VC ever asked, "Would you be willing to relocate to <CHEAPER CITY> for two years?" > And what’s in Davis? UC Davis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davi... > In 2006, Davis was ranked as the second most educated city (in terms of the percentage of residents with graduate degrees) in the US by CNN Money Magazine... ~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California Have you been there? It's nice. :-) It's close to the Bay Area and has lower costs and UC Davis. (And you don't have to put up with the constant cold winds! It's toasty there all year 'round!)

Apocryphon 8y ago

The video games industry is where we consistently hear some of the worst stories of workers being mistreated and lied to under dysfunctional management in toxic cultures. Constant crunch time for games that don't even succeed in the market. What would anti-union libertarians say about the labor conditions there? Workers should just avoid the game industry until more tolerable and better-paying workplaces arise? How is organizing workers not a valid solution to the problems there? Do they think that unions will somehow make the situation worse?

stevenwoo 8y ago
I've had several anti-union libertarian coworkers in the video game industry, each one thought they are exceptional so they don't need a union and they trust their choices/negotiation skills - to be fair probably everyone in game industry has a robust opinion of themselves.
mattnewport 8y ago
A part of the reason you hear these stories of the games industry is that it's a desirable job for many people. Games companies can get away with more than some other software companies because enough people want to work on games despite worse employment conditions than they might find with the same skill set elsewhere. There's a supply and demand issue. There's also a certain amount of self imposed crunch by people who are genuinely passionate about the game they're working on and don't have as many other demands on their time due to family or other outside interests or commitments. To the extent that unions improve worker conditions, they do so in part by restricting entry and thus influencing the supply side. In general unions tend to benefit people already in the industry at the expense of people outside who'd like to join, among other groups. Whether that's a desirable outcome depends on large part to which group you either belong or care about the most.
mrfredward 8y ago
Collective bargaining relies on negotiating blanket policies for all the workers. In some industries, that is fine. If all your brick layers get paid the same and given the same breaks, and all your brick-laying supervisors get their standard supervisor pay, that might be for the better. It doesn't work that way for knowledge workers and creative types. Some people are rare talents, some people are just okay. Some people fill wear 5 different hats and cover responsibilities outside their title. One artist may be the visionary behind your greatest success, another just follows orders, but both are on the same team and at the same level of the hierarchy. If you force a system where everyone makes the same salary based on how long they've worked there, the best people will leave. But if people negotiate for themselves, it isn't collective bargaining anymore, and you don't have a union. Want to prevent burnout? The union negotiates for rigid 9 to 5 hours. Many creative people will hate it. Or you let people come in when the want, but they have to fill out a timesheet, can't work overtime without the approval of both a manager and a union rep, and have to adhere to rigid guidelines. Unions can't work without bureaucracy, but creative people and creative organizations don't work well with bureaucracy.

bliblah 8y ago

I followed Telltales quite a bit before they went out of business, I even know a few people that worked/applied to work there. For me there were always red flags, they tried too hard to chase the dragon after the unexpected success of TWD, all of the sudden they were churning out 2-3 titles a year (17 individual episodes were released in 2017 alone) with an aging engine. They were constantly missing out release dates for episodes and unable to update their games for new experiences. Also do not forget that licences for these properties are very expensive to procure making it even more difficult to break even. They also added an Exec from Zynga as their CEO in 2017, which for me represent the very worst gaming has to offer in terms of low effort, exploitable gaming. This was the final nail in the coffin, unsustainable business practices with high level execs who only care about the bottom line always breeds failure. Its a shame, a lot of people knew the end was coming but management kept quiet until they literally had to close up shop and gave people a few hours to leave the building. All the workers there deserve better.

felipemnoa 8y ago
>>they tried too hard to chase the dragon What does this phrase mean? A google search game me results about heroin use which I don't think that that's what you meant.
- bliblah 8y ago
  In this case it means that they used too many resources to recreate their previous success, which happened to be fleeting.
- Topgamer7 8y ago
  It's analogous to the heroin reference. Basically as a company they were chasing that high from TWD's success in an unsustainable, detrimental manner.
debacle 8y ago
I listened to a podcast yesterday by someone whose friend was let go from Telltale. The key points seem to be: - Really bad (one sided) deals on IP. - Taking on more than they can chew. - A domino effect of failures. - Failing to adapt. It sounds like basically everyone saw the writing on the wall, but no one expected the end to be so inhumane.

derefr 8y ago

> trends like online shooters, Battle Royale games, loot boxes, or any of the other fads that have pulled teams off course with the false promise of easy money Citation? Because I always thought that game studios switched to these because they were “easy money”, not because they were fads. Critics and journalists disliking a thing is different than it not being a successful strategy.

GW150914 8y ago
In the Battle Royals space the place is littered with the corpses of devs and publishers who kept on the fad. PUBG got there first, and then FortNite leapfrogged them, and to be blunt all of other attempts are names with little or no recognition. Remember The Culling II? Yeah, neither do I. And I don’t remember the dozens of other games that have tried to copy the formula and never even got the trivial recognition of something like Radical Heights, which killed its publisher Boss Key. Fade in games go something like this: a workable formula makes someone a lot of money. They rise and at a certain thresholds major publishers take note and iterate, crushing the original. Then other publishers inject said mechanics into their flagship games until people are so sick of them that they can’t stand it. There is a reason why all of the big upcoming shooters like CoD IV have battle royale modes. To a lesser extent fads can burn out without studios ever really getting into it because it’s too small (relatively speaking of course). Surgeon Simulator set of years of “simulator” games ranging from I Am Bread to Black Screen Simulator. Eventually we got Shower With Your Dad Simulator which subverted the genre a bit, and set of another explosion of imitation. These indie fads tend to follow that pattern of initial massive explosion followed by secondary ignition when some slight twist on the formula introduces some air to the. mixture, and this repeats with smaller explosions until the last dregs of fuel are exhausted. Zombie modes are another example, as are hero shooters like OverWatch (the “big thing” before BR). Remember LawBreakers? Exactly. https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-trying-and-failing-compete/16712 https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-try... What we’re seeing now with BR as it played out last cycle.

madrox 8y ago

I would summarize it more simply as a failure of business to manage their money. Ed Catmull calls it "Feeding the Beast." They tried to turn interactive narrative into a factory that cranked out new titles. It's a shame. I haven't connected with stories in video games for a while. I still long for the emotional depth of Mass Effect and TWAU. Telltale was one of the good ones.

itsdrewmiller 8y ago

How did telltale have 90 developers to lay off in 2017? Wasn't their bread and butter a pretty simple quicktime event engine and their differentiator storytelling?

deleted 8y ago

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