Why Telltale Is Going Out Of Business
I'm sure you've all heard by now, but TFS Episode 4 will most likely be the last game ever developed and released by Telltale. This didn't come out of the blue, and it's pretty obvious why they croaked and to be honest, we all should've seen this a lot earlier.
The reason they went out of business was because of a lack of self reliance. They spent tons of money on major IPs such as The Walking Dead, Batman, Minecraft, etc. and didn't make enough of their own stories. They never made enough of their own homerun IPs that they could fall back on if the other ones failed. It seemed to always be a buying game with Telltale.
The amount of money that they spent on IPs made it so they had to sell more copies than they ever were capable of selling, and it didn't help that the leadership at Telltale was lacking. Every huge company has their own IP that they're known for. EA has Battlefield, TreyArch has Call of Duty, Nintendo has a plethora of franchises, Mojang had Minecraft, and you get the point. Telltale never had their own IP that they were known for. Telltale was known for the Walking Dead, which wasn't their own IP, and a character that they didn't actually completely own became the face of their company. That can't happen if you want to survive, no matter how good the franchise is. The face of the company needs to be someone original to them rather than a third party character.
Essentially, they bought too high and sold too low. Stranger Things was Telltale's last hope to get their stocks to surge, but it wasn't enough. They tried to run before they learned how to walk, and ran themselves into the ground.
It might not be the end of Telltale, because it's entirely possible that a company such as Microsoft or Sony buys them out, but the way Telltale was run drove it straight into the ground as a singular company. Had Telltale created that homerun IP that they would be known for, they might be printing money right now rather than going out of business.
Comments
Who created her? Kirk?
Well Telltale created her, but they also don't completely own her. They created a character for another company's IP rather than their own character for their own IP that they could use whenever they wanted. The Walking Dead had to go through Kirkman before being developed.
I mean that they didn't make a character that they could call their own. The face of the company was essentially a third party character that they helped create. The face of the company should've been a first party character that they could use whenever they wanted and however they wanted. Clementine might come back in a comic spinoff if Telltale doesn't kill her, because she's not Telltale's property.
EDIT: Also, will edit the part you quoted because it's not completely accurate.
I'm sad about what happened, but I saw it coming a long time ago (around 2011). By that time, small and no so small changes began to radically change what Telltale was when it started. When Mr. Brunner took the helm, those changes in company values and ethos just kept pushing away the core audience they had then.
Telltale managed to gather a new "core audience" (More than once, kudos to them for that!) However, the underlining issues persisted. Time and time again, they failed to address the real issues, even to the point of several memes now exists based on Telltale. The success they had with TWD season 1 probably cemented a lot of the issues in the mind of Mr. Brunner.
At some point in time most of the non-hard core audience began to abandon ship (Not to say several key personnel tired with the internal nonsense the company was dealing with) tired with delays, poor quality, bad support, miscommunication, eternal crunch time, and so on.
Even big license deals couldn't save Telltale, in fact most of those just made them push the "same rehashed game with a different coat of paint" motto again and again while requiring more resources just to keep up with the schedule. Again Mr. Brunner refused to see the problem.
By the time Mr. Brunner was forced to step-down, the damage was too much and even with the new CEO's stewardship, it was impossible to turn around due to three factors:
a) Money. I doubt investors were willing to continue to give blank checks to solve the issues for long. New deals were a risky business and those on the other end knew that Telltale was in trouble.
b) Brand (miss) recognition. Telltale became a joke brand associated with bug ridden interactive stories, with the same formulae rehashed again and again (now for the OUYA!, now about The Hot new TV Series, Now with more hyphens, colons and semi-colons too!)
c) Cornered by the Audience. Telltale had to do the games the way they had done them for the last 8 years. The "core audience" would not allow Telltale to deviate too much from the known path and that meant the potential customers are just a niche audience that continued to shrink month after month.
To recap... they ended this way because they allowed Mr. Brunner to do questionable things (that the board should have stopped but didn't) for too long.
And they had their own IP (and several creative folks known to deliver interesting IP, that obviously left the company a long ago), but they chose to continue to play the Big License game instead... and lost.
Exactly. They tried to run before they could walk. The Walking Dead and maybe The Wolf Among Us were really the only huge IPs that they struck gold on, but they managed to mess it up. They needed their own goldmine IP that they weren't renting from another company.
Their games stopped selling after TWD season 1 unfortunately. Maybe most people preferred to watch them on YouTube rather than buy them.
Having every other release being some new series was always a horrible idea. To think they totally changed directions with ANF thinking that would somehow be a good idea because it could attract new people. Horrible idea.
So the work for TWAU will never be seen? FFS...
I feel like ANF is 100% what caused much of this. ANF was the game that really turned alot of people off, so less sales.
I also think Telltale hiring voice actors for more languages was a really bad choice when they were in such finical issues, that is a lot of money being spent on something that they didnt "need."
Also, does anyone know what happened with the law suit? Deep down I feel like this suddenly happened because they lost it. Netflix gave them that money and all that maybe it wanst enough? I swear to god if they went down because of fucking Kevin the cuck ruining their games so no one buys them and then suing Ill be forever pissed.
I wouldn't say 100%, because even if ANF was good this would still be happening. Maybe it would be a year from now, but it would still happening. They were spending more money than they were making on expensive IPs.
This might not be the end, because it's technically not over until they declare bankruptcy. Right now, Telltale is essentially early 2000s SEGA but in worse shape.
Can someone sponsor Telltale like Sony or even other companies
Why did they make so many Walking dead game anyway? Yes, season 1 is a masterpiece but they just kept going and going and going.
Look at the comics and look at the tv show. That entire franchise is misery porn.
AMC keeps blindly pumping out more seasons of the show despite ratings crashing. Telltale shouldn't have kept trying to beat that dead horse.
Tales from the Borderlands is a masterpiece, but I understand why that probably underperformed. Borderlands is a niche franchise at the best of times, there hasn't been a new entry for years and years and Tales (which is a masterpiece!) Was too radically different from the main game to draw in Borderlands fans.
I love the Telltale Batman games but you have an uphill battle there with the shadow of the Arkham games. The telltale version eventually created their own cool take on the franchise and their Joker was fantastic, but it was too late. You can't win over the casual batman player who'd rather play the open world cinematic game rather than the point and click adventure game.
Did Minecraft sell well? I assume is sold something. It's clearly of some value. But when every child on the planet has played and is probably still playing some version of Minecraft, I can't imagine Story Mode being a high priority.
I would have played the hell out of another Fables game, but again, Fables is a niche brand, the comic ended years ago and the first season was a generation ago.
Guardians of the galaxy should have been a slam dunk and maybe the game was great. I don't know because I was put off by the rough characters and average voice acting. Plus Telltale had nothing they could do with Guardians that James Gunn hadn't already done and done far far better.
Game of Thrones was...well it was okay I guess. I still feel like that was a lost opportunity given how vast and fascinating the world of the franchise is and how the game was blindly determined to set its narrative right between a couple of tv seasons (complete with useless fan service tv characters showing up to wave their hands around and always remind the player right from episode 1 how ultimately pointless any decision would be). I cut Telltale some slack though because I can definitely picture HBO heavily breathing down Telltale's neck the entirety of development.
so i believe the closure is fake because of the walking dead
Mismanagement, poor customer service and just shitty games im sure had most to do with their demise... The wolf among us episode 2 crap years ago was probably a seed of this. That was just pure shit. And with telltale not being a AAA publisher they couldn't weather the consumer backlash.
I think alot of people just overestimated telltale, too. Their games were never really that good to begin with. Even their greatest success, the first season of walking dead, was a glitchfest of a game that barley worked. Its like they were just releasing a beta all the time. Everything they made after TWD S1 was progressively worse in different ways until that batman series came out. Which I admit was pretty good for what it was. Its harsh, but i think TTG got what they deserved. Its just too bad something like this couldn't happen to EA or Ubisoft lol.
Excactly, look at these awesome titles like GOT, TWAU and TFTBL. People are just saying 'they need their own IP' it's not that simple. Even if it did work that way, my life would've been a lot different, and so would Poogs' youtube channel, if Telltale never did their take on well-known franchises. So yes, I'm thankful for Wolf, I'm thankful for Tales, but I just hate ANF with it's underwhelming, terrible story that has so many mistakes and discrepancies.
They should just RIP and be remembered for the good they did bring to the industry, not go and Rob us through another avenue.