How Telltale Went Broke
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 ต.ค. 2018
- How a reliance on investment funding, a fruitless formula, and leaks to the press precipitated one catastrophic week in Telltale's 14-year history.
Reliance on investment funding: 3:30
The internal adoption of The Walking Dead's "formula:" 9:09
Leaks to the press: 12:45
Massive thanks to those who chose to reach out, and for them making so many great games over the years.
Music by the Raddest, Daddest, Ace Waters:
/ @amiewaters
Productivity & "crunch time" studies:
wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/...
bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral...
arxiv.org/pdf/1701.05789.pdf
BAFTA Awards interviews: • Story Winner in 2013: ...
Spike Awards interviews: • Video
The only damn footage I could find of the actual Spike awards speech: • The Walking Dead: Wins...
That IGN interview where that hilarious Warren Spector quote comes from: www.ign.com/articles/2003/09/... - เกม
Looks like they pushed the wrong button in the quick time event
Oopsies
They pushed f instead of p
You have a furry PFP
@@oldnosoul4183 You have a stupid dead unfunny meme PFP
@@goldentoparican788 it isn't a meme and never was it was a movement.
The fact that firewatch was made by the people who left telltale makes me wonder how many more amazing talented people they hid in there
oh shit, firewatch was a great game
You see this a lot in the industry. Folks who love working together will want to work together again, so not only do you get people leaving together to start something new, others who remember them may want to join them down the road. Though you have to be extremely careful about not violating non-compete clauses in contracts. Normally, you aren't allowed to reach out to current employees of your former job directly for X number of months, but they are always welcome to reach out to you.
@@enlighteneddoggo5803 It's not for everyone. The people who enjoy it did enjoy it a lot, which to me is a success
the walking simulation great ? The story not even that good compared to" life is strange "
@@danny90099 life is strange is still a really bad game
It's amazing how they got Guardians of the Galaxy, which might be one of the most popular marvel movies, and turned into a game that nobody remembers it exists
Kishibe Rohan Daga kotowaru
It was actually a good game thooo
Gotta be honest, this video introduced me to the notion that it even exists.
Kishibe Rohan I honestly enjoyed the game greatly.
The marketing for that was piss poor. I remember watching it first trailer after the game got released 😂
*Telltale shuts down*
Netflix : It’s free real estate
UpBeatz Gamz
*_netflix adaptation_*
Jeff Bezos: Not if I have anything to say about it, and I do.
@@xplosionslite6439 because I am black hahahahahaha I you do I will say the n word
@Edwin Cheesecake I played the Netflix version of Minecraft: Story Mode, and it was ok. Just wish they kept the quick time events, without them the game felt lackluster.
Skybound: hold my axe
*buys TWD and releases the final 2 episodes and plans to make more content outside of Clem's story*
So in short: telltale accidentally replicated, on a much smaller scale, the video game crash of the 80’s. Putting out the same product over and over again as a cash grab doesn’t work folks!
Bingo. The problem is, I don't think a lot of people remember or even know about the crash of the 80's. Plus, unhealthy and unsustainable work environments just seem to perpetuate themselves, mainly due to machismo. And high turnover is bad because all that experience that worker accumulated has just walked out the door, never to return.
Yet it works for call of duty...hmmm...
EA: Hold my beer
The last TWD was shit. Maybe that helped.
Making false promises will also get you cut by your target audience
Their problem was that their games aren't very buyable. Most people would much rather just watch the story than buy it themselves
If you can get the full experience of a game just by watching it, then it's not a game, it's a movie.
@Fa Mulan And then realize that making all the 'right' choices resulted in the exact same outcome with barely a few lines of dialogue different to acknowledge it?
Clementine Will Remember That. (And never mention it again.)
@@KantiDono I think whether that's true depends on what you consider "the full experience". I watch lets plays of JRPGs because I've found I just don't like most JRPG battle systems or minigames, but I do like their stories. However, other people *do* enjoy JRPG battle systems and minigames
So there are probably plenty of "walking simulators" or "interactive fiction" where there are some people who do get more out of playing them than watching someone play them, even if a lot of people don't.
@@rfmerrill Sure. Not every game is going to be for everyone, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Look at it this way: If TH-cam didn't exist, would you have bought all of those JRPGs you watched? Probably not from the sounds of it, because even if you were interested in the stories, the gameplay would have been too much of a slog for you to complete them yourself, right? Just because you watch a Let's Play doesn't mean that's a lost sale on the part of the developers.
To be honest I don’t feel bad for the company however I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs due to this companies poor decisions...
Nah, talented people always find jobs with ease. Also this might actually give some of the programmers to chase after their dreams.
Uğur Karaarslan thats not always the case
Then you are a smart and thoughtful person
*company’s poor decisions
Uğur Karaarslan Talented people create things, greedy cooperations get involved, original creators get kicked out and replaced with lawyers, company bank money and leave.
Rinse repeat and GG welcome to our “Advanced” society
TellTale: makes basically the same game
*Consumers will remember that*
But the games were good except some mainly wolf among us was best
@Crow the difference is EA Activision and Ubisoft have a formula that appeals to a wide audience, telltale didn't realize that their formula was very niche
*Consumers will not remember that
@Crow EA has dozen of franchises that aren't just the same game formula done for 7 years
It doesn't work because we actually remembered it.
Telltale won't remember this
I'm reminded of a scene in the first season of The Walking Dead. A character has the signature "I will remember this," then 10 seconds later they're shot dead.
And in game of thrones, 30 seconds before they die.
Yep, Lord Forrester, right? For me the game's audio chose to glitch out at that moment as well so for about 6 seconds you could only hear the Frey soldiers shouting "Kill, kill, kill, kill!" I remember thinking to myself "Yep, those 30 seconds right there are peak Telltale."
And in those ten seconds, he remembered it VERY vividly!
And thank god. They were making trash.
You and 99% of players saw that coming.
Lol
Lol
Lol
777
R.I.P Wolf among us season 2
and nothing of value was lost
If only they spent time putting there effort into the wolf amoung season 2, putting more effort in the walking dead games they would still be here!
@@gemmal2271 nope. They'd still be gone.
Even if they released Wolf Among Us 2, they'd still be financially fucked.
Damn shame, I've been wanting to see what happens with Bigby Wolf for years dammit.
@@YaowBucketHEAD People maybe have respect them more if they put more effort into their games instead of getting licenses from popular franchises.
@@JS-wp4gs it's a very good game wdym
Why do i feel like everything that happened in the last 4-5 years happened just yesterday ? I know this is random but does anyone else have that ?
BxPanda7 I've felt the same. I think in my case it started since I became more focused on youtube, social media e tc. Now that I'm slowly getting away from it I feel time has expanded and is getting back to normal again. Weird uh? I mean I haven't even been able to complete a single game in years, and I'm not even married or have kids :P
@@barbarianjk2355 Interesting, i had people tell me it's because of growing older, but i kind of don't see how that would work and i feel like people would have noticed much sooner if that was the case, also when asking my parents they said it's only the last couple of years that feel this fast to them, everything that came before seemed pretty consistent to them.
That lines up perfectly with what you said, maybe it's because of the incredible amount of information we get via the internet that we perceive time differently?
But that kind of still leaves one problem, if more stuff is happening and we know about more than ever, then why do some events feel like they just happened even though we already had a multitude of other events happening since ?
@@BxPanda7 well, one more thing I can mention is that I haven't read any book in 2 years, and I used to read a lot! I even used to read the whole Silmarillion at least once a year (which is my favourite book). But back to what you said, I think that it may have the opposite effect: that having too many memories to work with (specially small, unimportant ones) can make your brain feel confused about time. Our mind doesn't work like a computer, it treats information in ways that are convenient for our biology, and it completely doesn't work like a computer where each piece has a different file size, or where you can see the files ordered by date and so on. I'm sure that if there aren't studies on this matter already, there will be some in the near future, but the best method I've found is to organize the things I follow, like and comment on, and stay mostly with both the relevant people and stuff in my life. It's even helping me with stress :)
@@barbarianjk2355 Interesting, i know memories of events are directly tied to language and our capacity to put things into words.
It's not the same as places, faces, etc...
In the case of events, their chronology, location and details are all remembered by telling yourself the story, generally with vague images that show key moments you remember.
Most of it is literally a story that was put into words inside your mind, and every time you remember the story the exact words you used to describe the situation at the moments come back to you.
Which means that the way you define every moment you live is so very important, as it literally becomes your life story in the form of memories. (I actually just figured this out while writing this comment :o)
So knowing that, i think what's happening is that since we spend so much time gathering information, most of which is useless and forgotten about once it leaves our short term memory, and we barely give ourselves any downtime, our brain doesn't have much time to process everything that's happening.
For instance, i remember that when i was a kid i had allot of "downtime" where i would just sit around and think about stuff, and during that time everything that happened recently was being revisited, and that i think gives us allot more perspective on what happened and when.
Now compare this to nowadays, where i am constantly doing something, whatever it may be, i'm just always doing something, and i barely give myself the time to just sit around and think.
And because of that, i think that when you do remember something that happened some time ago, but you didn't give yourself the time to think about it and process it further, you will remember it sort of as if it had just happened yesterday ! You sort of "resume where you left off" in your thought process !
Now this is just me theorizing stuff, but i think it makes sense and would perfectly explain why our sense of time is so completely distorted ?
yes I can remember vividly waiting for the twd season 2 episodes to come out and being so happy Kenny was alive. I'm so glad I'm not the only one that feels this way! I think the reason why is because i had been collecting and taking photos of my activites these past 2 years. Which makes them feel like yesterday.
Basically, Telltale had a one-hit wonder and assumed that all they had to do was copy that one-hit wonder over and over again to achieve success. They're not the first group of people to fall into that trap.
But tftb was amazing
The Wolf Among Us was another great game, really not a "One-hit Wonder" scenario.
Might have been a great game and I agree with you on that but it wasn't that great when it came to profits. TWD earned several times what TWAU did
I'm assuming you mean TWD game. That was only successful because everyone and their entire family was obsessed with the show at the time. All their games were horrible and hardly games if you ask me. Might as well read the comics, it would have been cheaper.
@@taylorking460 a whole volume of comics would cost more than a telltale game. Just a few issues would cost about the same. And a movie costs, let's say, around $15 and lasts, let's say, an hour and a half. A full telltale game that lasts at least a few hours costs, on the Microsoft store, $15. You're going to tell me that for the time and the storytelling a telltale game isn't worth the money?
"the employees will remember this"
Management: "Oh, ok"
(Fires everyone and gets new employees to bleed dry)
NaZtRdAmUs And gamers will too.
*Employees die ten minutes later*
"All according to plan"
but this time it will matter
And it will have no consequences at all.
Awwww poor TellTale, getting killed in a 2 minute flashback
fucked up what they did to kenny
I'll never forgive them for doing that to Kenny
@@asfmankey3672 season 2 should’ve never happened there I said it
The problem with the Walking Dead Series is that after the first season, people learned that the in-game choices don't really make a difference in the story.
So there's no real reason for people to buy the game since they might as well just watch a Let's Play on TH-cam and consume the exact same content as the people who *did* buy the game... 😅
I gave up on playing the walking dead games after the walking dead 1 and 2,after that they announced twd 3 and it was awfull
The game of thrones game also kind of made your choices matter, at least when it came to the ending
Idk I played thru s1 a few times and played thru s2 twice will say that there are little additions that make the game feel more alive unique and personal to the player.
The biggest problem was the fact there were sequels. Not that the story was bad and all, but for the type of game they were, to make compelling reason to get a sequel which mostly makes anything you did before invalid, most didn’t bother actually getting it. An idea they could’ve done is how for season 2, they just basically make a movie for it since the ending of that season was something very important and climatic, so having a set thing happen would be nice, instead of getting an ending and have that ending not even matter as the next season has mostly new cast and is a few years in the future.
i like telltale and their games and all. but quantic dreams did it better
Days before they went bankrupt, the Vice President of Telltale, along with a whole team of recruiters came to our college, gave a whole 3 hour talk on storytelling and was doing a recruitment drive. It was on the Wednesday or Thursday right before they declared bankruptcy. Funny how most of them didn't really realize or were hiding it.
Anything interesting said?
.
The vice president certainly knew, and worse yet was he was trying to recruit people onto a failing company.
I'll be honest, I didn't attend it myself because I had no interest. I strongly dislike telltale and was laughing when I found out they were shut down. My roommate and good friend attended and met a few people to schedule interviews for an internship. Apparently they were going on and on about why they'd want to hire students "like us" from our university, because our art school emphasizes story and etc etc.
gyazo.com/ecd1ce479886d602d59b7c6a43812f32
As someone who works in the games industry, I can tell you that bosses know all about this but it is incredibly easy to replace us with eager and willing dopes.
That's the grim reality of every work field, period, no matter how many years of your life you pour into a business, you and every last member of your staff are expendable.
Preety much why management, higher ups and corporates get away with all the abuse despite unions and many attempts to protect workers...
Oh there's a video I could give you on the topic, I'd love to really, but... How good is your German?
Seeing one of my favorite TH-camrs on another one of my favorites? Heck yeah, man! :D Keep up the good work!
@@SianaGearz what Video would that be? Can you link it?
As far as i know links aren't allowed around these quarters, but treat yourself to "Die Feinde der Innovation - Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck" somewhere on the tubes.
The Walking Dead was released in 2012?
Jesus I feel old.
same here wtf happened to the time?
Gemma L most people seem to forget 2016 was 3 years ago
Ive been playing that game since I was...5 and I'm now 10...I think I have issues
Hush grampa.
Yeah I remember the memes about the world ending and watching pewdiepie cry at the end of the game
Why couldn’t it be EA
In an alternate universe
Do not fret, EA is also under fire.
Because EA is a publisher and Telltale is a developer.
@@welltypedwitch then why not dice
@@user-wo2zd5im4y because Dice makes decent games, that people keep buying
Can we also agree that the episodic formula doesn't work, nobody like to play a game for 1.5h then wait 2 month to play 1h then repeat the cycle for almost half a year
CaptainYoul yeah its a work in progress. The answer isn't simply "it doesn't work" its how many episodes before people quit. Its a profitable model and keeps the dev companies more relevant since there are smaller gaps between game releases
Yeah, it was popular for a while during that small window where Telltale had success. But I'm glad not that many games copied it, or that the ones that did didn't turn out to be a huge success (*cough*Hitman*cough*)
+FireB4llz. Yeah, that's my strategy too, I'm pretty patient so it's easy to wait.
+Mr Fred. You have a point. It needs to be used tactfully, you don't just chop a feature-length movie into pieces and release the bits over a year. That's essentially what most of these episodic games are doing.
You are right, its just another annoying video game marketing ploy that's trying to make it copy television, to the expense of the consumer (I assume its better to build that company's capital through development also?). Frankly though, I would rather have episodic games than have the current fixture of AAA gamblethons of lootboxes and 'live services'. The industry as a whole is just out to scam the consumer out of money.
@@atomknight8361 it's obviously not a profitable model, it may be profitable for a while but if you're trying to build a lasting company it won't work, at east for games.
Wait... Did you greenscreen yourself onto a slightly different shade of green?
It looks like he bluescreened himself in front of a greenscreen.
Next level stuff
Seriously, what is he doing with that? It's like an inside joke or something?
@@km099 Nah its a greenscreen. You can the green reflected in the table.
It might just be his wall? I’m not sure.
Now i'm curious what could possibly look so bad that greenscreening it with blue halo hair and neo avantgarde green shadow casting seemed preferable.
He "works at Valve" because Valve BOUGHT Campo Santo
And are basically sitting on them. I was so looking forward to 'Valley of Gods'.
@@TheProfessor529 It's going to come out. One day
@@TheProfessor529 hey, valve has a flat command structure. It's likely Campo could be keeping quiet about something cool for valve. But I digress, I could be wrong
Do they still have the receipt?
I bought a valve yesterday
As a vg dev, I really like that you are putting a spotlight on a very real problem of the industry in general, not just telltalegames. I hope managements will get the memo one day...
Good beard dude
A Super Bunnyhop notification is almost a jumpscare
spoooooooopy...
No, he bluescreened himself, which is why you can see blue in his hair
A bunnyhop-scare?
"We're not making money with the product we make right now. We need more workers to produce more of this very product so we finally turn a profit." Wot.
relevant OOTS: www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0135.html
Sometimes, that works, when the company actually understands why the product isn't popular and how to get there. Their position was wrongly "it's just dumb luck, if we release things more often, we will have luck more often". It's not entirely wrong as long as you maintain a baseline high level of quality and appeal and are just a tiny bit short of a success, and painfully wrong when every release erodes customer trust by being slightly worse than the previous one.
have you played starcraft
Because they were one of the 3 guys who started the company, that's how. Their CTO. The rest have departed with time, so that's who was left to take over the business operation as CEO.
Granted you'll see some insanity on management level in almost every company. At the lowest level of the management, it's the guy who says "yes" to everything, even if he can't deliver, and then whips his subordinates into delivering a crooked version of what he promised - he has nothing to lose, he can't be demoted to engineer, he has to go higher or perish. On the second higher up, it's the one who says "no" to everything, that is outside his direct sphere of influence and interferes actively with the work of everyone in the whole company, to pump more money to the "yes" guys under him. On the very top, it's the guy who ignores everyone. Sounds stupid, but look around you, you'll find exactly that. They often work against their own better judgement, just because that's what they have to do to survive in each respective position or move higher up the ranks. Every level is marked by either wild gambling or shifting the blame to others, rather than working towards a common goal of better more competitive product, higher customer satisfaction, higher return on inevitable spending, etc. Every level is progressively more innovation averse than the one below, because people get fired for innovating wrong, they can always talk their way out of responsibility for choosing the path that can be described as "safe" once you completely discount customer response and competition.
While the mechanism of failure is different with Telltale, you can see a lot of the same pattern, you can see the mode of failure that is very common, they underinnovated and overproduced, and devalued their brand in the process. In their own vague genre of story-driven gameplay-light titles, everyone else who took a stab at it consistently outdid them on innovation, quality, and customer response.
So, they basically have to forget everything they learnt on their management degrees, right?
"The Wolf Among Us" was easily my favorite title
yeah, i didn't mind that my choices meant shit. The setting was so unique that i was there for the slideshow.
@@Nemo7The7Pirate7 That was their only product I bought. Everything else from them looked so boring and stale. Not even their Borderlands titles got me interested and I really love Borderlands.
I think the premise was more interesting than the actual game.
Well mine was Batman Enemy Within i legit completed the game on my phone and not on xbox
The good thing that came out of it is, I'm interested to read Fables.
They bet a lot on just turning [Insert Popular Movie/Story] into a telltale game.
They did it so often you know exactly what I mean when I say "turned into a telltale game"
@Equity ok i would probably acutally pay for that just for the sake of it if telltale wasn't financially ruined
You're one of the only people that makes super informative and well researched videos about subjects like these instead of just jumping to conclusions to make sure you get your video out first
Telltle games didnt just die ... IT WAS MURDERED?!?
That 'leak' clause is crazy. What is to stop a company from putting a leak clause in and then leaking the information themselves and taking the money? That the company would accept such a deal shows how desperate they were.
first video ive seen of this channel, this is an easy sub if that is the case.
Syrmor can’t forget footaferret
Yes, one of them.
The problem is when you over saturate the market with your own games, you end up competing with yourself. It would be impossible to remain lucrative when your releases are forcing consumers to chose between your games.
It’s funny how a random TH-cam comment makes more sense than the entire head management of a company.
Most CEOs and Heads of Companies don't really know what the fuck they are doing anymore.
Anymore? Nobody ever knew what the fuck they were doing, ever.
While I don't disagree, they weren't the only ones out there.
They have competition out there that did what they did better, like Life is Strange and The Council.
The main issue they had was they did so much of it that it burned the audience out on that kind of game and episodic games are ripe for abandonware.
@@NathanCassidy721 if they had normal competition it would still be better than making too many games because they didnt spend money on developing games
I read the title as "How telltale's water broke"
Well Telltale could be a girl
Happy birthday
i love telltale but i have never played a Telltale game just watched them like a movie on youtube
Try it!!!
@@bbuggediffy no
Played only two of their games in full, just one Batman episode on PS3 (God, what a piece of insulting garbage...), all the rest I watched on YT. Would still need to think before saying which ones I watched and which ones I played. Feels the same and most people on YT playthroughs make exactly the same choices you would make anyway (be kind to good guys, try romancing chicks etc.).
Alexis Eronmwon The only good game worth playing is Sam and Max titles. That’s it. Their humor is the only good feature and the point and click is nice.
Exactly the same here
Wow, Telltale contacted me looking to interview me a year ago, and I had to inform them that they were probably too far north for me to commute daily, and we both passed on each other. Looking at what happened to them now, that passed chance was probably a good thing.
Unless you were the guy who could've saved the whole company, man!
GamerGod12 has joined the company
Nice sentiment, but, no, I am just a software engineer.
David Romig considering how soon to their shutdown they took on new people before suddenly throwing them into the wind, it was probably for the best. hopefully you got / will get a more stable job opportunity than that now though
Probably?
*the economy will remember that
Fake advertisement. At the end none of the choices mattered at all! I chose to "hope for game developers to get together and fight for better employment contracts" but that didn't do anything at all. Really hope they acknowledge that one in the sequel atleast!
I just called the chief he said this is it
And this time, it's actually remember it
"Video games require teams of handfuls, or tens, or hundreds of developers"
*STARDEW VALLEY INTENSIFIES*
edit: don't try to make games alone, its a lot of work according to Eric Barone.
Stardew valley is the shit
Undertale too.
@Erykaldo 120 its still an impressive game made by one person.
@@maximillianlylat1589 One person who worked on various things with other people. While he touched on everything, he did have a few other people helping him out.
I wouldn't call it bad. There's plenty of examples of bad games and its pushing it to simply just call it bad. Some opinions need more elaboration to be considered a good one.
*t h a t w a s n ' t v e r y c a s h m o n e y o f y o u*
This is the first time I’ve ever seen gameplay of the Guardians of the Galaxy game, so that must say a lot about the quality.
This one is not bad. I mean it has every single Telltale flaw in the book, but it ends up hurting it less and it manages to be humorous. But it's also a symptom of an issue because it's basically Tales from the Borderlands but 10 times less memorable.
I'd rate GotG as their third worst game, with second being Michonne and first being Game of Thrones.
They put Thanos in as the big villain, but kill him off halfway through the first episode, the the other 4 and a half episodes are spent basically jerking off. And all the characters are portrayed so poorly. They're all whiny brats, because the gimmick of the game is that oh no you gotta keep the team together! So no matter what you do, somebody is always whining about how you make terrible decisions. And it's completely pointless, because no matter who ends up leaving, you get them all back at the start of the final episode anyway. Imagine the end of Episode 4 of The Walking Dead Season 1, where it shows you who is going to stay with you and help you look for Clem in the final episode. Now imagine that instead of sticking with those choices in Episode 5, it just brought everyone back together so everyone helps you out anyway. That's Guardians of the Galaxy.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if maybe GotG is the worst. At least in Game of Thrones, I eventually found some fun in trying to pick choices that get as many of the Forresters killed as possible. Can't even do that in Guardians, those unlikable fuckers are always coming back. 🤔
My 5 yr old nephew got it. He only played it twice I think. He is only 5 tho. He prefers the lego games even though they all feel the same with some different mechanics here and there
mjc0961 Halfway? Try in the first 20 minutes
Most people went reacted to its announcement the way most react to a new CoD game:
With absolute apathy and no interest whatsoever.
Which is what really killed TellTale in the end.
How did Telltale go broke?
Well, here is a video explaining some of the Telltale signs!
thank you, very cool!
Oh god the puns
Go home comments, your drunk...
You had to make the pun,didn't you?
mraaronhd GOSH DARN IT, BARB!!!!!!!!!!!!
Detroit become human is what everybody thought Telltale’s games was like before the truth.
lol yeah..
Imagine if twd series was like detroit become human...
Lol imagine thinking Detroit become human is a good game. Watch Westworld and find out how much of a hack Quantic dreams is
@@VertSecretStash I mean it's fine in my opinion but whatever you say I guess.
Verte knight imagine thinking your opinion is better than others
Well to be honest all the choice is matter in Detroit become human
I'll always have a soft spot for Telltale because my friend was the voice actor for Ben Paul in 'The Walking Dead'
It will never not be surreal to hear his voice in that game
Oh hell yeah I loved Ben.
Fascinating character really because he shows our own inhumanity when we fail to forgive his failures. When we think of Ben as a 'lost cause' and forget that he is just a teenager scared out of his mind. Great acting work by your friend.
@@mikshin9825 That's very true. It's funny though, because he actually hates the character himself
really ? that's crazy good thing I saved him
@@katbird2699 no need to lie to seem cool to internet strangers. Being yourself, now that’s cool.
Whats funny is that original walking dead game was only good cause its story. The engine and "formula", was never good, as all the criticisms for their later games existed in the first TWD game.
Nah, the first Walking Dead game did actually change shit through C&C more than the other Telltale titles would (specifically with the variations of the Crawford segments), or just didn't have radical changes to its final end scene.
@@aNerdNamedJames so?
All of what you said goes out the window once you start Season 2.
So he is totally correct by what he said.
How does Season 2 factor in to a comment about "the first TWD game"?
You can tell that the writers of the first walking dead left. The second and third seasons' writing and characters are so forgettable and bland.
@Drizzt Do'urden TWD Season 2 has absolutely no bearing on how good Season 1 was. Oh no, Season 2 didn't have as many variations? Okay. Season 1 still did, so please stop talking out of your ass.
So essentially, Telltale should've done the following to stay alive:
1. Maintain the employee size or slightly increase it (+10 or so, but no more).
2. Work on an entirely new IP instead of just continuing the 'formula'.
3. Keep that 'formula' as a side-hustle for some quick plug'n'produce garbage while working on the new IP.
4. DON'T buy into other IPs, especially not expensive ones.
5. Spend the money that would've gone toward buying into other IPs on marketing the new IP instead.
6. Release the new IP before any more copypasta formula vomit.
7. Reap the rewards of the new IP.
8. Start funding another game (possibly under the last IP, possibly another new IP, based on success/critique).
9. Slightly increase employee size (+20 or so, but no more).
10. Continue being a successful, living game development studio.
Basically what BioWare did, after KOTOR, use their tech for a new original IP (Mass Effect), reap the rewards with game and merch. Too bad that didn't last either. :(
@Dan Nguyen They may not grow things explosively, but they will grow things healthily. If management prefers an unhealthy explosion, management needs an overhaul. Steady growth and NOT squandering the riches of the initial explosion of profit is important. Unless they're willing to hire someone entirely different to help run the company, you're gonna have an under-qualified noob in the lead chair at a rapidly expanding company. S' like giving someone who completed a two-hour flight sim a 737. Step by step, or it's gonna go down in flames.
Or just be EA
@@adorenu1338 (EA isn't the only living game company out there. No one should try to be EA, honestly. At least not current-gen EA.)
@@hauntedshadowslegacy2826 try to be pre 2000s EA then.
Everything from EA was awesome back then if you were old enough back then.
"...more people meant more time wasted training them on their unweildy proprietary engine..."
THIS is the essence of why we have the old saying "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
Imagine working in a kitchen.
Now imagine struggling due to bad equipment.
Your management hires two more cooks.
Management surprised when staff continues to struggle because the oven cannot be turned on.....
"Too many cooks spoil the broth." This idiom fits Telltale games perfectly.
Wait... it's been 6 years since TWD?
Jesus
Wait its been 4 billion years since the world was created
Jesus
Wait its been 50 years since the first pc was made
Jesus
@tek O it's been 2020 years since Jesus died
Jesus
Wait this comment is 1 year old
Jesus
SquareHead64 wait this reply is 2 hours old?
Jesus.
Love your research and reasonable approach on things. In the age of clickbait and "WHY X DIED AND THE INDUSTRY IS DOOMED" videos, I can always expect a reasoned and nuanced approach from you, George. Thank you!
GEORGE DIDN'T JUST DIE, HE WAS MURDERED
very interesting and very informative as he Always is i love this channel
The thumbnail was a giant clickbait. 'How it went down in a week'. It wasn't some overnight Bankruptcy.
TELLTALE WAS MURDERED
Rip X
Telltale went broke because of *ILLUSION OF CHOICE*
I only played Batman and I really loved the story but when I replayed it and made different choices only to pretty much have the same things happen killed the game for me. The only thing I felt like I was actually changing was how much Harvey Dent got burned
You have no idea what you’re talking about
@@sirprize275 I noticed that when I played the walking dead, replaying the game changed some dialogue but thats about i. Then when season 2 came out all the choices from season one had even less effect.
"Your choices matter" is pretty much the lie telltale sold games on
@@sirprize275 I feel sorry for you. Nowdays I always watch someone play at least the first 10-30 minutes of gameplay (depending on the type of game and it's scope) and then watch another person play the same game to get an idea about the variation it'll bring to the table.
With EVERY person playing a telltale game I always saw the same old watered down "choose your own adventure" scenario.
Sometimes it's fun to jump into an unknown game but I'd rather not take the risk nowdays.
You got that right Black Lung (Said in a Micah voice)
That happens to them for killing Lee.
Lee got did very dirty
Nice analysis. Thank you 🙏🏻 I really enjoyed TWD and Wolf Among Us - the rest I wasn't interested in
Didn't expect to see you here Karl rock.
Anyway love your vlogs
Tales from the Borderlands is arguably their best one behind TWD. I recommend it if you want a laugh. The writing was great.
Well hello there Karl
minecraft story mode?
Sorry, the Wolf what?
Watch well researched video. Read youtube comments: "No they went bankrupt because I didn't enjoy playing their games". Thanks YT commenters.
Its sort of true though. Their foemula wore out.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 I totally agree. But I'm talking about people who said they went bankrupt because that youtube commenter and his friends do not like these types of games. That's like saying diablo 3 isnt doing well because I dont like arpgs.
Ahh, TH-cam comments, that place where I can feel smarter than I am (^^;;;
I liked game of thrones. I thought it was a pretty good game but thats just me
The youtube comments usually are like the subreddits that no one knows
I played a lot of their games on TH-cam.
Horrigan Frank I think that was an issue that damaged sales of games for Telltale
Yeah, if you toggle between the like and dislike button (while watching a gameplay video) it's basically the equivalent of playing a TellTale game. Never understood the hype for these "games". The fact the TWD was so chronically popular (when the game came out) fully explains the fluke of their short lived success.
Ha!
Yap, this line sums up pretty much the whole company.
@Grym You hit the nail on the head in regard to the story telling aspect. That's so true.
R.I.P. Tales From The Borderlands season 2.
There was going to be a season 2?
@@granmastersword there was, yes....
@@wanderinwolf3804 why? Borderlands 3 continued the story directly
I noped out of Telltale when I figured out that my choices in their games barely changed anything in the actual story
Same
Warren Spector "the guy who made Deus Ex" said: "for 1 person to get credit for making a game is ridiculous."
whoops.
That's the joke.
Cough in Kojima
by kojima, with kojima
Extra Credits made the exact same joke. It's a good joke. Everybody laughs. Curtains.
Grant Parker especially funny considering all deus ex games sucked
Why telltale actually went bankrupt.
You have 2 important choices, this decision matters.
Option A gives result 1
Option B gives result 1
Oh no you got result 1 you're a terrible person I bet you feel bad, you bad you guy.
Yeah this and deleting saves
Worst part is when what you pick isn't what the character does.
yea, this was my core issue with the games. I've had so many people tell me that these games have multiple outcomes and endings, you get to choose what happens. At first glance it might seem that way, until you see other peoples play throughs. Game of thrones one is basically picking which characters die, that is it. everything is the same. Illusion of choice.
you bad you guy????
@@turtleanton6539 Yeah,*
Telltale Games: The POP Figures of video games
Tbh batman season 2 seemed like telltale finally going in the right direction. Then they broke halfway through the walking dead the final season.....
We live in an economy.
Or we think we live in an economy, goddamn ai putting caps on our natural recources in this digital world.
@@TribuneAquila resources*
A capitalist economy that doesn't work
Bronze : In an economy with decision makers who think short term, and little else.
@@christianknuchel Dammit. God help us.
Apart from the real journalism in 2018, I love the little background gag where you clearly used a bluescreen just to chroma key it to a different color of screen.
Literally and figuratively a background gag
It’s a green screen. You can see the green on the reflection of the table
It's blue, you can see the blue screen on his head.
@@x3n068 at 11:49 you can see blue screen flash around him
One of the things I love about Nintendo is that when they've made insufficient progress at the time of rapidly approaching release window, they don't push employees harder or sacrifice product quality. Their CEO makes a video personally apologizing to fans for the delay and promises to ship the game only when it's ready, thanking them for their patience. The CEO will even take pay cuts to be able to pay employees. And the wait is always worth it. It's just too bad they only adopt that strategy for their main IPs and not their spin-off/side titles (like Paper Mario).
On the other hand, I don't think the Game Freak developers get to see their families unless there's a new Pokemon game every year around the Christmas season.
@@benjamincooper358 i feel like game freak developers are bred in house and live, work, and die in the office, only seeing the light of day for their scheduled "Vitamin D Break" every day and at the end of their shift they all huddle in the basement for warmth. That is until the morning bell sounds 30 mins later and they have to get up and do it all over again.
@@autumn_breeze616 sounds like a black mirror episode
damn when you showed that 300 person staff picture I noticed my city’s civic center in the background. Looked it up and yup, turns out they’re based in my hometown, which I never even knew.
Still not a fan of them.
I still can't understand the warped mindsets of people who aren't rich CEO's and might be overworked and underappreciated employees themselves condemning unions as a bad thing. NO other industry is able to get away with half of what the AAA game industry gets away with and unions are one of the reasons why. What's so wrong about holding companies accountable for mistreating their workers?
it's easier to outsource digital jobs that to outsource jobs that require some phisicality
in that sense someone who works modelling houses in the next assassins creed or GTA is in a much more fragile position than someone who is building houses IRL, one can simply stsrt hiring cheap labour from Brazil or Eastern Europe
in reality though this is mostly USA's employee laws, which are incredibly shitty compared to most european countries.
Industrial construction is even worse in America.
@ Vitorgas1 Outsourced country quality is typically lower. Even in country outsourcing takes a quality/time hit because of the limitations. Outsorucing does not come without it's own associated costs...
Because unions are for commies, obviously. You don't want to be a commie, do you?
- Rich idiot who's forgotten how hard he struggled to get there
TellTale is essentially a warning to companies and consumers about what’s gonna happen if you try and base your entire business strategy around a “formula”. Rather than, oh I don’t know, something different with every iteration of your product.
A lesson nobody is gonna remember or learn anytime soon.
I think formulas work for some games. In particular I'd say that some multiplayer games have been all about perfecting a formula, where every iteration is just a very slight improvement on the established way of doing things. For story games I also think there can be formulas (that can, and should, be expanded and improved) but TellTale didn't have a great formula. It had some significant flaws, there were little to no improvements on it and there were some very important pieces missing. We've seen formulas reign supreme in genres for many years at a time, like how both point n' click, FPS and third person action adventures have all been very formulaic yet the dominant forms of storytelling in videogames. Doom established a formula that reigned for several years, then later the MMS formulas, point and click have had several standard models that have been followed almost dogmatically at times, platformers have been equally dogmatic at times and so on and so on. The thing is that even at the most dogmatic of times all of those genres have admitted that every game needs a Thing; a twist on the standard formula. TellTale thought that that twist could just be a new setting and decent writing, I guess.
Dark Souls best formula
I'm on my 5th Souls game and I'm very thirsty for more of the same!
I agree that having a "formula" that works is not necessarily an negative all the time. As a Pokemon and Zelda fan, having something familiar and fun is welcome. Especially when they are willing to shake things up.
BUT this is the "AAA" gaming industry we're talking about here. For every "Dark Souls", there are triple the amount of "Assassin's Creed" games. For every "Metal Gear Solid", there are quadruple the amount of "Call of Duty" wannabes.
The lesson TellTale tells us here is to not rest on your damn laurels just because you found something that works.
Getting woke isn't helping either.
So, it's either you evolve or dissolve.....If they had their own innovative IPs, took some risk with gameplay, and perhaps just concentrated on TWD & The Wolf Amongst Us, then they would be fine....
It's more complicated than that
@@garbagereviews3236 Yes, I agree..... In these times... Innovation alone cannot guarantee success. Planning, strategy and delivering what is demanded can help. I also hear that there were some employee problem too... Very uncertain times indeed.
Yeah, the closest they got to originals was licensing out indie comics from the folks in their art team ('Sam & Max', 'Puzzle Agent').
@@DarshD They could have focused on their best IPs and try making small changes to improve the quality and freshness rather than going on the ideal that selling on quantity is the better choice
Game Companies: **going broke**
Square Enix: **holds all final fantsay games and laughs in japanese**
When SE almost went bankrupt twice and were able to save themselves triumphantly and get back on top (the first Final Fantasy game and FFXIV: A Realm Reborn)
@@granmastersword yes that is what the joke is about
... the only thing i hv left from SE .. is sleeping dogs...
the game industry seriously needs a shake up. My friend is a programmer at Ubisoft and he tells me about the long work weeks near launch sleeping at his workstation and more he is glad his job is stable as he knows other studios like EA and others dump people after a project quite often. He says he wishes he did not have to crunch or work the long hours at times. And sometimes the higher ups demands are unreasonable like with Assassins creed unity it was shipped earlier than the team wanted due to that it was a mess and still is not exactly great. Like looking at rockstar atm i am excited to play red dead 2 but at the same time i worry and feel bad that people worked themselves to near breaking point to ship this game. For me i think programmers artists and more game devs etc need to unionize and demand better working conditions job security and bonuses considering how much money the ceo and companies make off these games.
*YES*
Heh, this is why whenever I see all these kids saying "I want to be a game developer, it would be so awesome" I'm like "no you don't." I've worked in software for about 20 years and even in applications, back-end systems, and more "traditional" development shops, it can be a brutal crunch. Game development is notoriously worse with tighter budgets, immovable deadlines "has to be out for Xmas season and there's no way we're delaying until Xmas next year", marketing having way too much say in the development design, and the "do it for the passion of games" attitude that pervades management. As a life long gamer it sounds awesome, but in the industry, games development is known as pretty much the shittiest job out there. Of course there are always exceptions and there may be a decent shop here and there, but for the most part, stay away from game development.
lordofentropy Yeah, the video games industry is a horrible mashup of software development and the entertainment industry. It has gotten better than it used to be, but it's a far cry from being a nice industry to work in.
@@lordofentropy I coded for a small mobile game "company" in highschool, if you can even call them that. Even doing simple games is more difficult than I think most people understand. I couldn't imagine working on any of these huge projects like Fallout, Red Dead, Spider-Man, God of War, etc. That must be unimaginable stress.
This is unfortunately not something that is just happening in the US, in large part since it's a global industry. You'll find the same kinds of stories everywhere, even in countries that are pretty keen on worker protection.
I have a teacher that work at Telltale for the earlier 10 years. He talked to us about how they were very explicit about the "golden formula" they had found and had "streamlined" it for the production and multiple episodes at a time. This was around the time Telltale started promising multiple seasons at a time and, as things always go, the execs were muddling up the production too much. So a 3 episode cyclical dev cycle ended up a 2.5 episode one, then a 1.5 episode one, then barely a single episode.
He also had major complaints about the engine which goes without saying and wasn't afraid to say the company was not managed well.
One last note of interest was a popular tweet that went around from one of the devs that said "Dont work unpaid overtime, companies dont care about you and are only concerned about their product" and unsuprisingly he sympathized with the sentiment.
Anyways, awesome video as always!
Even though it was their less profitable period, I miss Telltale's older, more lighthearted games. Of the newer ones, I think only Tales from the Borderlands tapped into that style.
Steely
And I’m pretty sure tftb was made like that due to borderlands humor, and less that they wanted to go back to that style
Poker at the Inventory is a good game to play now and then.
Everyone said that but I hate borderlands. So I never bought it
@@backlogbuddies If the game isn't your cup of tea, then that's understandable. Especially with the first entry
@@granmastersword yeah but it also shows how a bad license can affect what's supposed to be a good game.
Sword art online fatal bullet is a fun game but the sao part makes me not enjoy it. Because by the time sao gets introduced it becomes the main focus and kills the story
I don't like bl1&2 or the writing style in any of the games. Tt tends to emulate the writing styles.
With telltale shutting down, now we won't be getting TWAU s2 :((
Good thing it already exists. It's called fables.
@@SonofKalas22 what? a short story?
@@theworldoverheavan560 it's based on a comic series. It's a prequel
Have some Faith. LCG Entertainment, then company that bought Telltale, just said they are announcing a big game this year, and it will be big for Telltale fans. The Telltale FB page just teased a photo of Bigby Wolf back in September so, you can guess what's next, right?
TWAU s2....
was announced!!!
This video should be titled “best example of everything wrong with the video game industry”
"History won't remember this (because, like the choices in the games, nothing they made really matters)"
William Poole Eh. It's good to know so corporations (both gaming and non gaming) won't be an idiot and do the same thing.
@@OriginalKasym based on EA and Ubisoft's output, investors are out of touch with the gaming consumers.
Nah, history remembers some really unimportant stuff.
Wow... it is refreshing to see actual journalism on a youtube channel. I'm subscribed to a lot of channels but it is mostly subjective criticism and opinions. Well done!
These journalism pieces you put out week after week are so entertaining and so informative, well written and edited that I find myself re-watching them over and over, as I would a good movie or a favorite tale. Congratulations for outstanding skills Super Bunnyhop, and for taking TH-cam game journalism to a respectable and reliable level. Well done, sir.
Heh. Telltale was like the Funko Pop of vidyagames. Snap up every IP in sight and pump out the same product.
funko pop puts out some pretty good quality figures for a not very high price. The detail work on the bob ross figure is amazing. they perfectly recreated bob's painting on a 1 square centimeter canvas.
Okay. But _personally_ I find Funkos pretty fugly, and there's alternatives out there like Nendoroids or Figmas.
You're then missing out on the "not very high price" factor, sadly.
Can we not fight and just say Ea is worse?
@@ThatBum42 total agreement. Funkos are hideous. It irritates me that they have their fingers in every IP because I want better figures than what they offer, but they often end up being the only figure available of more obscure characters.
I was complaining for years about the game sins in telltale titles that were always kept. I didn't mind that they sticked to a single formula but not improving that formula at all was just lazy.
Simple things like unskippable cutscenes, unskippable spoilers for next episodes, etc..
Even when they made improvements like dividing episodes into chapters they actually dropped that and reverted back.
Hearing about the management I can actually imagine a CEO or some head designer going like "Chapters? We didn't have chapters in walking dead 1. Delete that useful and convenient feature right now!"
That's what I was thinking. You had the rights to the WALK DEAD, why didn't they do more with that?????
@@jaymounes9473 lazy or/and stupid
@Crow Telltale went down because idiots like you worked there.
@Crow A Telltale game has no replayability. What if you buy into the whole 'choices matter' aspect and want to play the game over again with different choices to see if you get a different ending? Who is going to do that when you have to sit through all the unchanging cutscenes, and the 'next time such and such will happen' segments? A Telltale game can only be played once, then forgotten about.
jesus your videos are so well-researched and high-quality. you rock
"doing is unproductive" - Max CEO
why did you greenscreen yourself to appear as though you are sitting in front of a greenscreen?
it is a bluescreen. but still why?
Want green. Have blue. Make do.
l,mao
yeah, use colors everyone else uses. don't be unique
@@falseshepherd-490 you're missing the point. Why use a blue screen to change the background to a solid color. That's just extra editing time, and in this case it was wasted time because it's not done very well. The video and the content is all good, but the blue screen looks bad, it would be better to just film in front of a wall in your house than go through the effort of doing blue screen effects
That is some fine investigative journalism right there.
God dam I really wanted tales from borderlands 2
6:39 you can't fool me. Even if it's background music, I will always recognize red soil wetlands.
It's ironic Taletell had a Borderlands license. A franchise that it's 1st game was raw, brown, full of potential, etc. And then it's 2nds game was amazing, colorful, fully realized.
Point is Taletell screwed its self by not innovating and pushing the status quo.
@Jay M cool story bro
Upper management thought that Minecraft Story Mode should have been rated M, it's pretty obvious why they went broke.
wait..... WHAT?
the article saying it was originally rated M was a typo, it was actually originally going to be rated T because of some dick jokes. still a dumb decision, but not nearly that catastrophic
Racist Minecraft creeper
Rated M for Minecraft, duh.
Ah, I guess that explains the part in episode 3 where Steve reaches for the officer's service weapon and then it fades to black
Another huge thing that doomed them was game streaming, these games are perfect watch games rather than play games.
Exactly, even as a trophy hunter I can barely push through these games. Why finish Minecraft story mode when I’ve already seen the ending. The only one I’d actually play is Batman, because batman is fucking cool.
@@14TND88 I would have liked to see Telltale do a Superman game.
Eamonn Deane that would be great
@@14TND88 I feel the Overpowered nature of Telltale Games' combat scenes would have worked well with the Man of Steel and with the choice based nature of the main gameplay fits with the character's struggle on either how much he should help people.....
The game for content creator lol
And people are still sleeping on Tales from the Borderlands.
It is a great game.
Fellow Templar Bro
@@fellowtemplar5679 uh...
It’s being canonically continued in Borderlands 3
It's a great "game". I loved the story.
The reason you don't get the pre holiday strike in game development as you do in other fields is because games can cut corners and still be "functional", and invariably sell well.
If your makeup artist goes on strike in a film, you are out an entire character. If nobody is there to operate a camera, you are out the camera.
A game can be made essentially finished without really needing finishing touches. Once the engine is made it's not like the devs can take that with them, for example.
Basically what I'm saying is that game dev teams are going to have a hard time going on strike because asshole companies can and WILL ship unfinished games if it means protecting their profits.
True
If the programmers strike, everything stops.
But they'll lose said profits if there's also a consumer boycott, it's worked before. The only ones winning this game are the companies, so everyone who isn't a company should step up.
@@verybarebones There's always been an EA boycott upheld for various time frames by various people. It's never gotten anywhere.
@@christianknuchel amp.businessinsider.com/star-wars-battlefront-2-drops-loot-boxes-2018-3
The problem is that usually people think "talking shit about it on the internet while spending money in a game" Is boycott. You have to hit them in the wallet.
How the hell do quicktime event games hit the market and a shit load of them come out, but no one brings back point and click adventures?
I want The Journeyman Project 4!
Very interesting indeed, cuz I just happened to find The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief a really entertaining game altogether, but suuure, genre is toootally dead.
Point and click games are cheap to make, so it's cheaper to just make them in bulk and rely solely on word of mouth. They're also pretty flexible so you can pepper in a ton of other gamestyles into the formula and market the game as a hidden object game, or a murder mystery so it sells better on the ios store.
"no one brings back point and click adventures."
There are more point and click adventures than ever before. Check out adventuregamers reviews for recent releases.
@@johndeacon6308
I was going to say, I only play point and click adventures (aside from Tomb Raider or the likes) and I never had a shortage of games to choose from.
Right now I'm playing Lamplight City, an old school Lucas Arts-ish detective story with pretty graphics.
When you make a decision and you see the prompt saying “this choice will effect the future” but think nothing of it
11:51 okay, is that a green screen, are you breaking reality or is the beer hitting me harder than normal
Calling it "Interactive" story feels more appropriate than "game", but whatever.
Agreed.
Choose Your Own Adventure, or Visual Novel are the best descriptions.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 I think visual novel is more of an adaptation of a pre-existent story in which you cannot choose the way it plays out, and I would not use the word adventure since the ways of interaction are very limited, that is hardly an adventure. Interactive novel maybe....?
+Leonardo Domínguez Lobos Visual novel is a genre of game most prevalent in japan, with an explicit focus on branching storyline and multiple endings. Chose your own adventure is the game given to the late sixties paperbacks in the vein of 'Fighting Fantasy'. The firsttext adventures explicitly attempted to digitalise these.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 Visual novel is too broad of a concept to define this very specific type of product (not a fan of these by the way), hell, even films are visual novels to some extent. I would still use other name to categorize them, like Interactive stories.
Didnt know that they did a guardians of the galaxy game
Nor did a lot of other people. Why it didn't sell well.
I knew it... It just sucked.
this was what I think their biggest problem was. Their marketing sucked.
It's bad ass
@@jroc3080 Their "games" sucked, too.
Most elaborate comb-over I've seen in quite some time, keep it up!
Why wouldn’t I just watch a telltale game on TH-cam, it’s not like there’s any actual gameplay
Because it feels more "alive", supposedly. Idk, I already hate quick-time events, so a game that's nothing but qte + monorail story just does not sound fun.
Most games are a monorail story anyway the only difference is gameplay and presentation.
Would u rather watch a movie with a youtuber commenting at everything or watch it at the cinema? Simple really.
Tales from the Borderlands is the unsung gem of TellTale Games.
Telltales name being on a borderlands title is why I never played I think the borderlands devs and writers are far better I should give it a shot but I hate telltale but love borderlands so conflicted I am
Indeed
It also makes me think they should have done more comedic in tone games.
ShadowWolfRising is Wolf Among Us more comedic or dramatic?
I will name my first born Loader Bot
There is no good Telltale game because they are not games.
All I got from this is that Telltale Games' management didn't know what they were doing (surprise surprise, why is this such a common theme in video game development???) and ended up blaming it on "fines from leakers" instead of their own mismanagement.
Idle Thumbs network fan here - I do remember the time they made the move from Telltale to having their own company - and everntually breaking up again as they were taken in by Valve.
They tried to turn making video games into a factory assembly line. Video games should be works of art but CEOs only see the dollar signs :(
Nepu-Tech USA CEOs are the ones with the most artistic side integrity its other people who do these things
@@GlowZoe Sure...
I applied for an attorney position at Netflix last year and one of the questions on the application was where I think Netflix should focus its efforts next. I discussed video games and mentioned Telltale and TWD by name as being a perfect tie in with Netflix's original content. Very weird coincidence, I'm sure.
Sue them for stealing your idea! Thought that was why you went to law school in the first place yeah? :P
Ha! I wouldn't even be mad if my suggestion was what prompted the partnership. I am mad however at what a mess it turned into.
Did u get the job at Netflix
In the end, good that you weren't hired. It wasn't that good of an idea after all.
That is fucking hilarious.
TL:DW: properly manage your staff and projects, don't rely on other people's IPs, and make sure your games are on a more sustainable level of quality instead of a big spike that drops off pretty far pretty quick.
Also don't rely on heavily outdated software that slows you down and don't repeat a flawed formula over and over again in spite of constant negative feedback.
@@sofija1996 The formula could have worked - the problem was the missing variety. Common complaint on some of these games was the "doesn't feel like it mattered"-choices for ex. More diverse paths, more creativity in these (even spanning multiple episodes) could have saved them for a while. I guess it would have been expensive, but pull it off successfully and you bet you can use that expertise for future games. Create the unexpected.
They really shouldn't have been grabbing those IPs unless the IP holders were going to front most of the dev costs under contract.
Companies like Quantic Dream, Supermassive Games, & DontNod have been skirting around this issue by making original IP and working with partners that cover a lion share of the development costs.
The gameplay of the walking dead never interested me. So when all their games started to follow that mold it made it so I wasn't interested in any of their games
I've been playing too much multiplayer games and became burnt out on them.
So the walking dead game was a nice change of pace for me. But all the other telltale games look boring and seem to be a waste of time.