The Closure of Telltale Games: My Thoughts

Telltale Games; to many gamers, that name signifies the best storytelling in the business; to others it represents a tired studio repackaging the same title repeatedly for popular franchises. Regretfully, the latter has now outweighed the former and the studio is set to be put to rest. How did it happen? I’ll try to figure out why…

The company started off, innocently enough in 2005, making small-scale poker titles before taking on licensed material, the first of which being CSI and the classic Sam and Max titles. But in 2012, the company outdid itself with The Walking Dead Season 1; while Telltale had engaged fans of the point-and-click adventure game, they had never broken into the AAA scene before. TWD changed this, solidifying the developer as one of the best storytellers in the entire industry. As of 2014, a gargantuan 28 million copies were sold and based on my own playthrough that same year, it’s very much deserving of that success. It’s an incredibly powerful and emotional journey from beginning to end, capped off by one of the most heart-breaking conclusions gaming has ever seen, all those reaction videos on the internet didn’t lie at the time. But such a huge success proved to be a double-edged sword; on the one hand, Telltale’s writers were given a respect like nothing they’d seen before, but on the other it bred repetition, and this would grind on for the next five years.

When a successful formula is established, any entertainment sector is set to repeat it and as a developer, Telltale believed that the stories they wrote would be able to carry an entire game; so long as the narratives were deep, and the characters varied, players would keep coming back for more. So, the releases kept on coming, utilising the same game engine and common formula every time; combined with the wide use of digital distribution, development costs could be consistently kept down. At some point between 2012 and 2018, priorities shifted; with this samey design established, Telltale would bid for ever-more popular franchises, often looking to cash in on surges in popularity. For example, Guardians of the Galaxy was released in 2017 to coincide with the second film from Marvel while two seasons of Minecraft were put out to capitalise on the game’s wild popularity. This went on for quite some time; the developer would often put out three separate titles a year, rather than the usual two. As the cycle continued, more and more players were turned off by Telltale’s approach; some grew tired of seeing the same “Character will remember that” line without any payoff while other expressed great disappointment that the studio was prioritising some franchises over others, most notably how The Wolf Among Us Season 2 got pushed back in favour of Minecraft. The turning point for me was Game of Thrones Season 1 which did keep in line with the show but fell short of being memorable.

When you combine this half-baked business strategy with growing apathy from fans, Telltale should have known it couldn’t last. For the past year or so, employee burnout and management problems plagued the studio; just as gamers were getting tired of the same gameplay formula without any kind of progression, so too were employees becoming tired of making the same game over and over just for a different license. It’s clear to me that there came a point where Telltale stopped moving forwards; simultaneously the storytelling that worked so well before started to get weaker. Being bound to the same formula time and again without finding ways to expand and adjust the ways players can influence the narrative made each new release less and less impactful. The video: “The Problem with Telltale Games” by Haedox is a great breakdown of the issues the studio went through.

On September 21^st 2018 it was announced that Telltale Games would be issuing mass lay-offs and slowly shutting down with only 25 employees remaining to form a skeleton crew. The Wolf Among Us Season 2, Game of Thrones Season 2 and Stranger Things have all been cancelled and the final season of The Walking Dead remains tentative for the rest of the year. It’s ironic that the game that shot the developer to super-stardom will now be their swansong. Currently I can’t find the first episode on Steam, which leads me to believe the final season may also be put on the chopping block. Ultimately, Telltale’s library of episodic adventures drastically varies in quality but if you asked me to put the major releases in order from best to worst, here’s how I’d rank them…

Best

1. The Walking Dead Season 1

2. Tales from the Borderlands Season 1

3. The Wolf Among Us Season 1

4. The Walking Dead Season 2

5. Batman: The Enemy Within

6. The Walking Dead: Michonne

7. Guardians of the Galaxy

8. The Walking Dead: A New Frontier

9. Minecraft Story Mode: Season 1

10. Minecraft Story Mode: Season 2

11. Game of Thrones: Season 1

12. Jurassic Park: The Game

Worst

For its employees, the closure of Telltale Games is a nightmare and I wish them all the best in finding new jobs and positions to rescue their livelihoods. But for the company, it seems their flawed ways of doing business and endlessly repetitive releases finally did them in. They crash out of the industry leaving a considerable void in the point-and-click adventure genre. New developers such as Big Bad Wolf may pick up the torch but Telltale’s end teaches a valuable lesson; static development cycles will always grow stale after some time and that moving forward should be held in equally high regard.

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