15 ms·

The tragic end of Telltale Games

145 points by eaguyhn 8y ago

scoom 8y ago
"Tragic"
- 7000skeletons 8y ago
  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.
k__ 8y ago
"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...
- pjc50 8y ago
  If you want to work in games, the crunch and toxic management are endemic almost everywhere.
- criley2 8y ago
  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...
  - k__ 8y ago
    "Call of Duty" and "Assassin's Creed" are made by different studios and owned by big publishers I think. Activision and Ubisoft offer different games.
    - kevingadd 8y ago
      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.
      - Insanity 8y ago
        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.
  - GarrisonPrime 8y ago
    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.
- kevingadd 8y ago
  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.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > 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.
  - b_tterc_p 8y ago
    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.
  - melcor 8y ago
    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.
  - tablethnuser 8y ago
    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.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  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.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  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.
the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
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.
- scoom 8y ago
  You mean like this: https://www.sovereign.co.nz/life-and-disability/pages/income-protection.aspx https://www.sovereign.co.nz/life-and-disability/pages/income... ?
- tpetry 8y ago
  Move to a differenz country ;) Germany has this automatically, it‘s called „Arbeitslosengeld“.
  - michaf 8y ago
    And if your employer goes bankrupt, there is an additional 3 month of guaranteed salary ("Insolvenzgeld", by the state) afaik.
- mcjiggerlog 8y ago
  In Europe its called "Social Security"
  - kryptiskt 8y ago
    No, it’s not. In Sweden unemployment insurance and socialbidrag are very different concepts. The latter is very meager and has intrusive checks.
  - dudul 8y ago
    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.
    - mcjiggerlog 8y ago
JohnStrangeII 8y ago
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.
- jamesrcole 8y ago
  > 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).
  - noirbot 8y ago
    They did do a Guardians of the Galaxy one, but in general, not a lot of movies. They did do a ton of work (exclusively?) with other people's IPs, which may have been what they were trying to say.
    - jamesrcole 8y ago
      But that wasn't an adaptation of the movies. It's an original story, and based on the comics not the movies.
      - ByThyGrace 8y ago
        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.
        8y ago
coldcode 8y ago
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.
aikah 8y ago
Sometimes you simply got to let the data speak for themselves: https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX 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.
- Fragoel2 8y ago
  Apparently making the same game over and over (with different intellectual property to tie it up) does not pay off.
  - kevingadd 8y 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.
  - gassed 8y ago
    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?
    - 7000skeletons 8y ago
      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.
    - prithee 8y ago
      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.)
gerardnll 8y ago
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).
- Celarnor 8y ago
  In most states, no notice (or even a reason) is required. We call it 'at-will employment'.
- gaius 8y ago
  If the company ceases to exist, then many of its usual responsibilities don’t exist either
  - falcolas 8y ago
    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.
    - gaius 8y ago
      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.
      - Insanity 8y ago
        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
      - cf141q5325 8y ago
mattlondon 8y ago
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!
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  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.
hanselot 8y ago
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.
Entalpi 8y ago
“/../ 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.
- wafflesraccoon 8y ago
  Typically most states will let you file for unemployment benefits if you are laid off, these vary from state to state.
mathattack 8y ago
Absolutely sh!tty way to treat people. Won’t those left demand massive retention bonuses? How fungible are game dev skills? At least folks are getting released into a hot tech market.
- taneq 8y ago
  > How fungible are game dev skills? 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.
tablethnuser 8y ago
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.
- bliblah 8y ago
  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. [1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-1-000-jobs-lost-to-studio-closures-over-the-past-year https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...
  - sizzle 8y ago
    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.
erikb 8y ago
> 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.
erfgh 8y ago
tl;dr: Company ran out of money and shut down.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
pwaivers 8y ago
> "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?
- ocschwar 8y ago
  Their dudebro managers are interviewing at EA too.
- jccalhoun 8y ago
  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?
sxp62000 8y ago
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.
tempodox 8y ago
I can only hope that the call for a union takes hold. Although I‘m not overly optimistic.
dang 8y ago
Previous threads on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066920
beerlord 8y ago
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).

145 points by eaguyhn 8y ago

scoom 8y ago

"Tragic"

7000skeletons 8y ago
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.

k__ 8y ago

"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...

pjc50 8y ago
If you want to work in games, the crunch and toxic management are endemic almost everywhere.
criley2 8y ago
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...
- k__ 8y ago
  "Call of Duty" and "Assassin's Creed" are made by different studios and owned by big publishers I think. Activision and Ubisoft offer different games.
  - kevingadd 8y ago
    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.
    - Insanity 8y ago
      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.
- GarrisonPrime 8y ago
  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.
kevingadd 8y ago
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.
crispyambulance 8y ago
> 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.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  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.
- melcor 8y ago
  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.
- tablethnuser 8y ago
  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.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
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.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
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.

the_mitsuhiko 8y ago

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.

scoom 8y ago
You mean like this: https://www.sovereign.co.nz/life-and-disability/pages/income-protection.aspx https://www.sovereign.co.nz/life-and-disability/pages/income... ?
tpetry 8y ago
Move to a differenz country ;) Germany has this automatically, it‘s called „Arbeitslosengeld“.
- michaf 8y ago
  And if your employer goes bankrupt, there is an additional 3 month of guaranteed salary ("Insolvenzgeld", by the state) afaik.
mcjiggerlog 8y ago
In Europe its called "Social Security"
- kryptiskt 8y ago
  No, it’s not. In Sweden unemployment insurance and socialbidrag are very different concepts. The latter is very meager and has intrusive checks.
- dudul 8y ago
  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.
  - mcjiggerlog 8y ago

JohnStrangeII 8y ago

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.

jamesrcole 8y ago
> 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).
- noirbot 8y ago
  They did do a Guardians of the Galaxy one, but in general, not a lot of movies. They did do a ton of work (exclusively?) with other people's IPs, which may have been what they were trying to say.
  - jamesrcole 8y ago
    But that wasn't an adaptation of the movies. It's an original story, and based on the comics not the movies.
    - ByThyGrace 8y ago
      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.
      - 8y ago

coldcode 8y ago

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.

aikah 8y ago

Sometimes you simply got to let the data speak for themselves: https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX 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.

Fragoel2 8y ago
Apparently making the same game over and over (with different intellectual property to tie it up) does not pay off.
- kevingadd 8y 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.
- gassed 8y ago
  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?
  - 7000skeletons 8y ago
    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.
  - prithee 8y ago
    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.)

gerardnll 8y ago

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).

Celarnor 8y ago
In most states, no notice (or even a reason) is required. We call it 'at-will employment'.
gaius 8y ago
If the company ceases to exist, then many of its usual responsibilities don’t exist either
- falcolas 8y ago
  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.
  - gaius 8y ago
    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.
    - Insanity 8y ago
      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
    - cf141q5325 8y ago

mattlondon 8y ago

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!

WorldMaker 8y ago
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.

hanselot 8y ago

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.

Entalpi 8y ago

“/../ 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.

wafflesraccoon 8y ago
Typically most states will let you file for unemployment benefits if you are laid off, these vary from state to state.

mathattack 8y ago

Absolutely sh!tty way to treat people. Won’t those left demand massive retention bonuses? How fungible are game dev skills? At least folks are getting released into a hot tech market.

taneq 8y ago
> How fungible are game dev skills? 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.

tablethnuser 8y ago

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.

bliblah 8y ago
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. [1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-1-000-jobs-lost-to-studio-closures-over-the-past-year https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...
- sizzle 8y ago
  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.

erikb 8y ago

> 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.

erfgh 8y ago

tl;dr: Company ran out of money and shut down.

dang 8y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

pwaivers 8y ago

> "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?

ocschwar 8y ago
Their dudebro managers are interviewing at EA too.
jccalhoun 8y ago
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?

sxp62000 8y ago

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.

tempodox 8y ago

I can only hope that the call for a union takes hold. Although I‘m not overly optimistic.

dang 8y ago

Previous threads on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066920

beerlord 8y ago

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).