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Now confirmed Telltale Studios closing down

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    #16
    It's hard to say but it seems like the genre as a whole isn't viable. If true, it seems like barely any of the games were profitable and yet they not only kept churning them out, but they kept making sequels to commercial failures too.

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      #17
      It's a huge leap to say the genre isn't viable. As you say, they were churning them out. That doesn't mean the genre isn't viable. It means that the number they were producing and budget they were putting into them weren't viable under the circumstances they were making them, of which we know little.

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        #18
        Was definitely mismanagement according to the previous employee in the tweet above they knew about the bad decisions being made but they just could not do anything i am sure they tried to feed it back but probably fell on deaf ears, and apparently it was business as normal as people were actually starting there the previous week.

        My theory on that is I suspect the upper management try to give the illusion of business as normal so will work out deals and start production on projects, I would guess not to reduce stock price or to scare off investors, and then behind the scenes try to secure funding to keep them a float.

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          #19
          It'll come down to when final facts are known, I know it's being banded around that close to only two games they put out where considered financial successes which if true suggests the market isn't there unless for their stuff. I guess Quantic Dream is an outlier on that but it's the other end of the project scale, Dontnod too with Life is Strange but they've yet to properly see if people keep coming back either.

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            #20
            ‘Financial success’ is too variable and dependent on too many things to make any judgement on genre based on even a load of games not meeting the criteria. Justice League was not a financial success and yet a large amount of movies would be celebrated bringing in that same numbers. All that is clear here is that Telltale failed. If you personally want to write off the genre and this works with your narrative, fine, but this is not actually yet saying anything about the genre itself.

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              #21
              There’s demand for these types of games I reckon. They just need to be done better and be less broken. Telltale failing doesn’t mean the genre failed. Not necessarily anyway.

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                #22
                Originally posted by fishbowlhead View Post
                If there’s no money there’s no money. Can’t pay severance when the account is empty and the company is entering receivership, crap as it is that’s the way it goes when a company pops.
                I get that, but my point is that the account didn't get empty suddenly overnight. Carrying on as if there's no problem, and allowing new hires to go ahead and relocate cross-country to work with you when you know the coffers are due to run out in one week is what I take issue with.

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                  #23
                  Dunno how accurate this is,

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                    #24
                    That's very interesting. The only big surprise in there for me is Minecraft Story Mode, partly because I would have expected better with it being Minecraft and partly because they then continued to make more. But this could be indicative of the problems behind the scenes. It's possible they got themselves into a licensing deal which gave them no choice but to see it through to a defined end point. I don't know. That's speculation on my part. The thing about licensing deals is that there is no standard - some seemingly huge properties can be remarkably easy and low-risk to license and others can have so many conditions and restrictions that they have to do stupidly well to make anyone money. If that chart is accurate, I see no way that Minecraft or most of the other licenses were paying off.

                    It also shows an incredibly huge drop off of even The Walking Dead, the most critically-acclaimed series of the bunch. Season 2 still has impressive figures but season 3's performance is incredibly poor. And licenses like Guardians and Batman did them no favours. That doesn't hugely surprise me. I love Guardians, for example, and love what Telltale do but I had no desire to play their Guardians game. It doesn't feel like a good fit for me. I know how hard building a new brand can be versus what appears to be a safer bet in licensing brand recognition but, for this kind of game, it seems like few licenses would be a good fit and maybe they should have built more of their own stories from the ground up after that Walking Dead success.

                    But I also think their episodes strategy worked against them as much as working for them. For so many of these, there was an initial buzz on the launch of the first episode but I would rarely ever jump in at that point, instead waiting for the story to be finished. But by that point, we were hearing nothing so the game had vanished from my radar. And so it was a missed purchase. I get that the idea is that it could cash flow the rest of the game but it feels like it could have been a flawed strategy.

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                      #25
                      Originally posted by Dogg Thang View Post
                      But I also think their episodes strategy worked against them as much as working for them. For so many of these, there was an initial buzz on the launch of the first episode but I would rarely ever jump in at that point, instead waiting for the story to be finished. But by that point, we were hearing nothing so the game had vanished from my radar. And so it was a missed purchase. I get that the idea is that it could cash flow the rest of the game but it feels like it could have been a flawed strategy.
                      I'm somewhat shocked it's still going on. Then again The Walking Dead TV show still is too, I guess?

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                        #26
                        Its sad to hear as I'd have liked to have seen what could have been done with another season of The Wolf Among Us. As it stands though its a shame they won't finish their take on The Walking Dead. The upswing is that at least players will get to decide what happens to Clementine.

                        The alternative is that the final season is finished by another developer. It would feel quite disjointed though and therein lies another issue.
                        Last edited by Paddy; 24-09-2018, 21:39.

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                          #27
                          There’s no way they would have been this far into it and not had all episodes written and recorded and likely almost all of the assets built. So it’s a possibility but seems very unlikely. However, it still does seem to me like the issue of people having paid for the full season needs to be addressed. I’m surprised they haven’t made a clear statement on it yet. Had the company been snuffed out, that would be one thing but the fact that it is staying open to fulfil a Minecraft Netflix contract would say to me that they have as much obligation to finish a season people have already paid for.

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                            #28
                            Apparently Walking Dead may have options to get it completed: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/201...o_be_completed

                            All a bit vague though.

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                              #29
                              I'd imagine those offers come in good faith but with the hope not too much needs doing to finish them off as well. Can't imagine too many devs are in the position to divert resources to half a game they don't own and is now known it wasn't selling that well either. Hopefully they had most of the work under their belt and they can just about push the eps over the finish line.

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                                #30
                                I thought they were going bankrupt by the initial announcement, hence my comments about redundancy.

                                However they are actually just scaling right back is that right?

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