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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

by 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.)
    - taneq 8y ago
      Sounds like those Sierra games. Those hacks.
      - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        Yup. LucasArts too obviously. It doesn't really matter if the gameplay is identical and the puzzles similar and formulaic if the story is interesting and the game is fun. Perhaps there's just no appetite for the adventure genre anymore?
        usrusr 8y ago
        Or there is appetite, just not at the speed at which Telltale was pushing out sequels. They have clearly been successful for a while (otherwise hardly anybody would be noticing their demise), but while sequels are comfortably predictable compared to the lottery ticket of a fresh launch, they also come with an inherent limitation: the market for a sequel can be no bigger than the number of people who have already consumed the iteration before and still want more. There will always be losses. Repeat that a few times and numbers will be predictably low. Do the same at a high release cadence and you also lose those who might eventually want a sequel, but not at the prescribed sped, they may not even have finished the previous iteration. Consumers who built up a consumption backlog will lose interest in the whole franchise because they are immune to new release hype.
        Footkerchief 8y ago
        Classic adventure games thrived on the originality of their settings and characters.
      - prithee 8y ago
        The Sierra DNA is there, but on a much, much more accessible level (for better or worse depending on how you want to take on the narrative or the game.)
  - bliblah 8y ago
    All the games followed the same basic gameplay roadmap. Event happens -> Talk to other characters -> Another event happens Usually the events were cutscenes or QTEs (timed button presses) that you either pass or get a gameover if you fail too many. Now this wouldn't be an issue if the games were marketed as such but instead they tried to present them with the taglines "Your choices have consequences" while it was clearly not the case. You could run the same game twice making completely opposite choices and the end results were always the same; sometimes a character would die but at most that just resulted in some extra dialogue since those characters were designed to be non essential. Here is an example of what I mean: Alice is a fugitive on the run and needs a car so she can: 1)Go to her friend Bob and have him drive the car after asking him 2)Threaten Bob to drive her around In the end Bob is always driving the car and his opinion of you doesn't matter outside a throwaway line where he says "Hey, you owe me!" or "Hey, you're a jerk!" The illusion of choice is very apparent at times even DURING the game since the events occurring are just too limiting. It didn't help that Life is Strange and the Witcher 3 came out and had more in depth consequences and exploration of these systems.
    - na412 8y ago
      I haven't played any of these games either, and the kinds of "press a button in time to make stuff happen" events you describe are something I really hate in games, so I don't think I will. That said, your description of the illusion of choice in the story... sounds like every story-based videogame ever. I've been playing games since the 90s, and I can't really think of any such games off the top of my head where your choices will lead you down a completely different path. Commonly the game will have different ending cutscenes depending on your choices, but the main story quest always takes you to the same locations. Deus Ex was lauded for giving you choices, but you always took the same general path through the game. Maybe you saved that character and then you meet him again for a short conversation much later - but it didn't really matter. Planescape Torment is often described as the best story-driven RPG ever written. While it had lots of optional sidequests and offered the option to roleplay your character in loads of different ways, in the end you always took the same path through the main storyline. These are just two examples of higly rated, character- and story-driven games that happen to be among my favorite games of all time. It's understandable, after all creating content costs money, and content that won't be seen except by a tiny minority of players seems like a sunk cost to the developers.
  - jccalhoun 8y ago
    As others have posted, the game play of all of them are largely the same. They were really fighting their game engine which really limited what they could do. For example, at one point in one of their games the characters had to go into a building and I wondered how they were going to do that because of the limits of the engine. They just played a cut scene instead of having the player do it. The strengths were in the writing and voice acting.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Sad that an adventure game studio could die off for this reason when "Call of Duty" is pretty much the same game every year and somehow manages to be one of the best selling franchises of all time.
    - gassed 8y ago
      Just because they make adventure games they aren't superior. Also your argument is flawed. After all, all football matches are the same.
- everyone 8y ago
  It seems to work for most AAA games.. In fact they usually dont even bother changing IP eg. assassins creed series, farcry series, call of duty series, madden series, etc. etc. Look at the ridiculously popular battle-royale games like fortnight.. They are pretty much clones of each other, and that gameplay has been done (better) decades ago.
  - plopz 8y ago
    Battle royale games were done better decades ago? I can't even think of a battle royale game from the 90s.
    - everyone 8y ago
      quake, unreal tournament, tribes, battlefield, planetside.. Deathmatch with many players. Same thing pretty much, but with more action.
      - plopz 8y ago
        The fundamental difference between all of those games and what I would consider a battle royale game is you only get 1 life. As an aside, I loved Tribes 2 construction mod.
        everyone 8y ago
        I dont know but I'd bet theres an old quake mod that makes that small change.
        jaegerpicker 8y ago
        it's not a small change, it completely changes the style and feel of the game play.
        Kiro 8y ago
        Just stop. You clearly have no idea what a Battle Royale game is.
kevingadd 8y ago
Important to keep in mind here that all sales numbers for digital titles are, by necessity, estimates because major marketplaces like Steam not only don't release numbers but place limits on what kind of information developers can release. Previous services for estimating sales numbers were shut down by Valve. SteamSpy was at least fairly accurate up until it was shut down, but it also leaves out sales on consoles and non-steam storefronts. Another factor is that many of these games are 'prestige brands' like Minecraft or The Walking Dead, which means there may be partnership funding involved. This is demonstrated by how Telltale spoke about keeping a skeleton crew around to finish a game in order to fulfill obligations to partners - if that's happening it's because money changed hands. (I agree in general with the premise that the writing has been on the wall for Telltale, just not that a steamspy chart is proof that the company was already dead in the water)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
7000skeletons 8y ago
Jesus, I knew their sales had been rocky but I didn't realise HOW rocky. I guess the formula they had for games didn't really pay off across multiple instances.
- kevingadd 8y ago
  It's similar to how (in general) an industry-wide theme is that episodic titles have significant sales drop-off in later episodes. Sequels do too, albeit less so and less consistently. This is part of why companies selling episodic games (telltale included) try to sell you a whole season up front. A big notable example is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13 trilogy (3 games, FF13, FF13-2, and Lightning Returns), where IIRC sales basically halved on each release - so Lightning Returns sold about 0.25x what FF13 did [1]. (FF13 sold well, so this is at least not completely dire). You can often make this up by spending less money to develop later episodes & sequels, which was true for both Telltale and the FF13 trilogy - but eventually it's not sustainable anymore. 1: http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/27/lightning-returns-lowest-opening-sales-final-fantasy-xiii-game/ http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/27/lightning-returns-lowes...
  - 7000skeletons 8y ago
    I can't help but think there's some truth to all the talk about people growing tired of the same mechanics being used in essentially every Telltale game after the first series of The Walking Dead. Going from personal experience, it was a hell of a ride the first outing but it grew pretty samey even when new settings and stories were applied to it.
    - GarrisonPrime 8y ago
      Agreed. I tired of the gameplay very quickly after the first game. Felt too contrived and transparent. Couldn’t even force myself to finish the free first chapters of some of their later games. Oh well, it was a nice brief ride.
    - xirdstl 8y ago
      It wasn't just the gameplay for me, but the episodic format. I grew tired of that, and I would wait until all episodes were released to buy. By then, I might have either forgotten about the game, or could get it for a substantial discount.
lmm 8y ago
The gaming press is more press than gaming; they're often people with writing degrees who are disproportionately fond of "literary" games compared to the buying public.
- screye 8y ago
  This is very true. Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game. Their articles often read like someone who is hoping for a regular media house to notice and hire them, rather than a gamer writing for other gamers. Gaming's biggest personalities are on YouTube and Twitch. ACG, Angry Joe, TB (rip), Dunkey have a significantly better say on whether a game gets played or not. Brothers a tale of sons, is one such game whose success can be in part attributed to TB pushing it very hard, on his YT channel. Among the younger generation, let's play and streamers are the bigger influencers. At least that is what I feel like looking at my younger cousins. There are a few good gaming review websites, but the likes of IGN, Polygon and GameSpot feel like surrogate marketting agencies at this point.
  - Razengan 8y ago
    I have been gaming literally my entire life save for the first couple years, spending thousands of dollars on games every year, and I have never watched any of those “gaming personalities.”
    - michaelscott 8y ago
      If it helps add another data point to the mix, I can confirm parent's comment on these personalities and their influence within the gaming community. A number of them often provide in-depth critiques and unexpected insights on game design that take the form of comedic video quasi-essays, and they rack up huge subscriber counts.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
jamesrcole 8y ago
Worth noting that this data is from steamspy (http://steamspy.com/about http://steamspy.com/about) so only covers Steam, and is also not fully accurate. How representative it is of the overall picture I can't say. I would imagine that Telltale's style of games sell more on phones/tablets and on consoles, but of course the sales on those platforms may well show the same trends over time.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Indications seem to be that Minecraft: Story Mode was the studio's next most profitable after TWD S1 (and why the Netflix Minecraft: Story Mode project is the last project in the black-ish and the last project they seem required to try to finish), which is definitely not visible in the steamspy statistics, and definitely an indicator of the importance to non-Steam sales.
Thaxll 8y ago
That's one of the reason why big studio don't create new IPs very often, it's very expensive / risky, a false move and you can lay off hundred of people.
adamrezich 8y ago
TWDS1 was free many times, and has been included in Humble Bundles for years, so these numbers don't reflect actual sales or desire to purchase the game at full price or even on sale, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
chaostheory 8y ago
The problem was that TellTale promised games in which your decisions actually affect the game world as opposed to just slight changes in character dialog with a game on rails. While they did improve this mechanic a little in later games, it was still too little too late. I'm pretty sure it was this that affected their sales long term. In their defense, very few games are able to actually pull this off despite their marketing.
Chris_Chambers 8y ago
That image cannot be viewed on mobile. The resolution is too low to read any of the text even when zoomed in.
CM30 8y ago
I suspect at least part of it came from Telltale getting access to all these big IPs. I mean, if they're making games based on the Walking Dead and Minecraft and Batman and Game of Thrones they have to be doing well, right? You don't expect the film studio adapting Lord of the Rings or James Bond to be in financial peril, so maybe the same would seem true for game developers too. But of course, names don't tell the full picture, and even major brands can sell poorly if the product isn't interesting/great (like many later Telltale titles).

by aikah 8y 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.)
  - taneq 8y ago
    Sounds like those Sierra games. Those hacks.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      Yup. LucasArts too obviously. It doesn't really matter if the gameplay is identical and the puzzles similar and formulaic if the story is interesting and the game is fun. Perhaps there's just no appetite for the adventure genre anymore?
      - usrusr 8y ago
        Or there is appetite, just not at the speed at which Telltale was pushing out sequels. They have clearly been successful for a while (otherwise hardly anybody would be noticing their demise), but while sequels are comfortably predictable compared to the lottery ticket of a fresh launch, they also come with an inherent limitation: the market for a sequel can be no bigger than the number of people who have already consumed the iteration before and still want more. There will always be losses. Repeat that a few times and numbers will be predictably low. Do the same at a high release cadence and you also lose those who might eventually want a sequel, but not at the prescribed sped, they may not even have finished the previous iteration. Consumers who built up a consumption backlog will lose interest in the whole franchise because they are immune to new release hype.
      - Footkerchief 8y ago
        Classic adventure games thrived on the originality of their settings and characters.
    - prithee 8y ago
      The Sierra DNA is there, but on a much, much more accessible level (for better or worse depending on how you want to take on the narrative or the game.)
- bliblah 8y ago
  All the games followed the same basic gameplay roadmap. Event happens -> Talk to other characters -> Another event happens Usually the events were cutscenes or QTEs (timed button presses) that you either pass or get a gameover if you fail too many. Now this wouldn't be an issue if the games were marketed as such but instead they tried to present them with the taglines "Your choices have consequences" while it was clearly not the case. You could run the same game twice making completely opposite choices and the end results were always the same; sometimes a character would die but at most that just resulted in some extra dialogue since those characters were designed to be non essential. Here is an example of what I mean: Alice is a fugitive on the run and needs a car so she can: 1)Go to her friend Bob and have him drive the car after asking him 2)Threaten Bob to drive her around In the end Bob is always driving the car and his opinion of you doesn't matter outside a throwaway line where he says "Hey, you owe me!" or "Hey, you're a jerk!" The illusion of choice is very apparent at times even DURING the game since the events occurring are just too limiting. It didn't help that Life is Strange and the Witcher 3 came out and had more in depth consequences and exploration of these systems.
  - na412 8y ago
    I haven't played any of these games either, and the kinds of "press a button in time to make stuff happen" events you describe are something I really hate in games, so I don't think I will. That said, your description of the illusion of choice in the story... sounds like every story-based videogame ever. I've been playing games since the 90s, and I can't really think of any such games off the top of my head where your choices will lead you down a completely different path. Commonly the game will have different ending cutscenes depending on your choices, but the main story quest always takes you to the same locations. Deus Ex was lauded for giving you choices, but you always took the same general path through the game. Maybe you saved that character and then you meet him again for a short conversation much later - but it didn't really matter. Planescape Torment is often described as the best story-driven RPG ever written. While it had lots of optional sidequests and offered the option to roleplay your character in loads of different ways, in the end you always took the same path through the main storyline. These are just two examples of higly rated, character- and story-driven games that happen to be among my favorite games of all time. It's understandable, after all creating content costs money, and content that won't be seen except by a tiny minority of players seems like a sunk cost to the developers.
- jccalhoun 8y ago
  As others have posted, the game play of all of them are largely the same. They were really fighting their game engine which really limited what they could do. For example, at one point in one of their games the characters had to go into a building and I wondered how they were going to do that because of the limits of the engine. They just played a cut scene instead of having the player do it. The strengths were in the writing and voice acting.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Sad that an adventure game studio could die off for this reason when "Call of Duty" is pretty much the same game every year and somehow manages to be one of the best selling franchises of all time.
  - gassed 8y ago
    Just because they make adventure games they aren't superior. Also your argument is flawed. After all, all football matches are the same.
everyone 8y ago
It seems to work for most AAA games.. In fact they usually dont even bother changing IP eg. assassins creed series, farcry series, call of duty series, madden series, etc. etc. Look at the ridiculously popular battle-royale games like fortnight.. They are pretty much clones of each other, and that gameplay has been done (better) decades ago.
- plopz 8y ago
  Battle royale games were done better decades ago? I can't even think of a battle royale game from the 90s.
  - everyone 8y ago
    quake, unreal tournament, tribes, battlefield, planetside.. Deathmatch with many players. Same thing pretty much, but with more action.
    - plopz 8y ago
      The fundamental difference between all of those games and what I would consider a battle royale game is you only get 1 life. As an aside, I loved Tribes 2 construction mod.
      - everyone 8y ago
        I dont know but I'd bet theres an old quake mod that makes that small change.
        jaegerpicker 8y ago
        it's not a small change, it completely changes the style and feel of the game play.
        Kiro 8y ago
        Just stop. You clearly have no idea what a Battle Royale game is.

kevingadd 8y ago

Important to keep in mind here that all sales numbers for digital titles are, by necessity, estimates because major marketplaces like Steam not only don't release numbers but place limits on what kind of information developers can release. Previous services for estimating sales numbers were shut down by Valve. SteamSpy was at least fairly accurate up until it was shut down, but it also leaves out sales on consoles and non-steam storefronts. Another factor is that many of these games are 'prestige brands' like Minecraft or The Walking Dead, which means there may be partnership funding involved. This is demonstrated by how Telltale spoke about keeping a skeleton crew around to finish a game in order to fulfill obligations to partners - if that's happening it's because money changed hands. (I agree in general with the premise that the writing has been on the wall for Telltale, just not that a steamspy chart is proof that the company was already dead in the water)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

7000skeletons 8y ago

Jesus, I knew their sales had been rocky but I didn't realise HOW rocky. I guess the formula they had for games didn't really pay off across multiple instances.

kevingadd 8y ago
It's similar to how (in general) an industry-wide theme is that episodic titles have significant sales drop-off in later episodes. Sequels do too, albeit less so and less consistently. This is part of why companies selling episodic games (telltale included) try to sell you a whole season up front. A big notable example is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13 trilogy (3 games, FF13, FF13-2, and Lightning Returns), where IIRC sales basically halved on each release - so Lightning Returns sold about 0.25x what FF13 did [1]. (FF13 sold well, so this is at least not completely dire). You can often make this up by spending less money to develop later episodes & sequels, which was true for both Telltale and the FF13 trilogy - but eventually it's not sustainable anymore. 1: http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/27/lightning-returns-lowest-opening-sales-final-fantasy-xiii-game/ http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/27/lightning-returns-lowes...
- 7000skeletons 8y ago
  I can't help but think there's some truth to all the talk about people growing tired of the same mechanics being used in essentially every Telltale game after the first series of The Walking Dead. Going from personal experience, it was a hell of a ride the first outing but it grew pretty samey even when new settings and stories were applied to it.
  - GarrisonPrime 8y ago
    Agreed. I tired of the gameplay very quickly after the first game. Felt too contrived and transparent. Couldn’t even force myself to finish the free first chapters of some of their later games. Oh well, it was a nice brief ride.
  - xirdstl 8y ago
    It wasn't just the gameplay for me, but the episodic format. I grew tired of that, and I would wait until all episodes were released to buy. By then, I might have either forgotten about the game, or could get it for a substantial discount.

lmm 8y ago

The gaming press is more press than gaming; they're often people with writing degrees who are disproportionately fond of "literary" games compared to the buying public.

screye 8y ago
This is very true. Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game. Their articles often read like someone who is hoping for a regular media house to notice and hire them, rather than a gamer writing for other gamers. Gaming's biggest personalities are on YouTube and Twitch. ACG, Angry Joe, TB (rip), Dunkey have a significantly better say on whether a game gets played or not. Brothers a tale of sons, is one such game whose success can be in part attributed to TB pushing it very hard, on his YT channel. Among the younger generation, let's play and streamers are the bigger influencers. At least that is what I feel like looking at my younger cousins. There are a few good gaming review websites, but the likes of IGN, Polygon and GameSpot feel like surrogate marketting agencies at this point.
- Razengan 8y ago
  I have been gaming literally my entire life save for the first couple years, spending thousands of dollars on games every year, and I have never watched any of those “gaming personalities.”
  - michaelscott 8y ago
    If it helps add another data point to the mix, I can confirm parent's comment on these personalities and their influence within the gaming community. A number of them often provide in-depth critiques and unexpected insights on game design that take the form of comedic video quasi-essays, and they rack up huge subscriber counts.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

jamesrcole 8y ago

Worth noting that this data is from steamspy (http://steamspy.com/about http://steamspy.com/about) so only covers Steam, and is also not fully accurate. How representative it is of the overall picture I can't say. I would imagine that Telltale's style of games sell more on phones/tablets and on consoles, but of course the sales on those platforms may well show the same trends over time.

WorldMaker 8y ago
Indications seem to be that Minecraft: Story Mode was the studio's next most profitable after TWD S1 (and why the Netflix Minecraft: Story Mode project is the last project in the black-ish and the last project they seem required to try to finish), which is definitely not visible in the steamspy statistics, and definitely an indicator of the importance to non-Steam sales.

Thaxll 8y ago

That's one of the reason why big studio don't create new IPs very often, it's very expensive / risky, a false move and you can lay off hundred of people.

adamrezich 8y ago

TWDS1 was free many times, and has been included in Humble Bundles for years, so these numbers don't reflect actual sales or desire to purchase the game at full price or even on sale, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

chaostheory 8y ago

The problem was that TellTale promised games in which your decisions actually affect the game world as opposed to just slight changes in character dialog with a game on rails. While they did improve this mechanic a little in later games, it was still too little too late. I'm pretty sure it was this that affected their sales long term. In their defense, very few games are able to actually pull this off despite their marketing.

Chris_Chambers 8y ago

That image cannot be viewed on mobile. The resolution is too low to read any of the text even when zoomed in.

CM30 8y ago

I suspect at least part of it came from Telltale getting access to all these big IPs. I mean, if they're making games based on the Walking Dead and Minecraft and Batman and Game of Thrones they have to be doing well, right? You don't expect the film studio adapting Lord of the Rings or James Bond to be in financial peril, so maybe the same would seem true for game developers too. But of course, names don't tell the full picture, and even major brands can sell poorly if the product isn't interesting/great (like many later Telltale titles).