Tales from the Borderlands was considered a financial failure
http://comicbook.com/gaming/amp/2017/08/09/was-tales-from-the-borderlands-considered-a-failure-/
Here is the link to the article that goes more into detail, but apparently despite the fact that plenty of fans loved it, the game was considered a failure in terms of sale and production.
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it was the 3rd highest selling game made by telltales don't understand how that makes sense
The production costs were to high. They didn't lose any money, but they didn't made much, either
If you don't wanna read the whole blog post, one of the quotes from Nick Herman was:
That really sucks, it was one of the best Telltale games and so many people loved it and it did everything right and yet it didn't make as much money as they hoped, hopefully, if there's a Season 2, it sells amazingly!
So Tales was practically the Mirror's Edge/Alan Wake of Telltale, huh? I can believe it. Telltale's best selling games are actually TWD, TWAU, Minecraft, and Batman right now, but I hope when all of their current games are done they decide to go back to Tales for a season 2.
That's really too bad. I can only imagine how bad-- financially --they'd push themselves if they did a Tales S2.. but hopefully that'd sell better than the first season. It was loads of fun, and I wouldn't want to see it dip in quality or Telltale losing faith if it stays financially flawed...
The game had extremely good content and detail, I'm not surprised that it took so long to complete and was so expensive to complete. (I just finished it lol)
It's honestly very hard to hear, makes the hopes of getting Season 2 very unlikely. They would obviously have to cheapen production costs if they were to do one, and that could lead to a more disappointing final product.
This is such a shitty thing to do. Especially when you sell a season pass, meaning people put trust on your game company and product.
Unpaid, I guess.
Well my day is ruined
Yep this news is devastating.
TWD may be my favourite because hey it's zombies, but for actual story and pure entertainment boarderlands is right at the top.
Surely with all the experience they have now they could produce a new season cheaper.
Better yet put it on games with gold/ps plus and see interest in a S2 sky rocket.
I'd throw money at the TV now if they announced it lol
So disappointed
"Tales was my life for two years, and internally it was perceived as a failure. Critically it was a huge success, but from a sales and production standpoint, it wasn’t awesome.
...That said, by the time the fifth episode of the series rolled around, 95 percent of its staff moved on to another project before its completion. “We had at least one person from every department working on the game,” noted Herman. “But that’s a very small team for an episode.”
https://aotf.com/news/tales-from-the-borderlands-was-perceived-as-a-failure-according-to-the-developer/
Honestly, with how disappointed they are with the sales of TFTB, I cant imagine how disappointed they are with the sales of their most recent games that came after Tales. They must be dumbfounded.
Considering developers literally say "We werent losing money but we werent making as much as we wanted" is not a failure, and the fact that then the writer of this article just goes, "lol shit dog, they consider that shits a FAILURE man
" just makes the writer look really dumb.
Thats like saying, Well I was hoping to sell this Ball I got for 10 dollars, which I made myself for 5 dollars, but I was only able to sell the ball for 7 dollars, so this is a FAILURE.
If I had to guess, I'd think TFTBL was TTG's most expensive endeavor. The rights to use the IP and music rights had to have been on the more expensive side. That's still no excuse for how it was treated internally by management, but it could explain why (as it seems like it's being implied) TFTBL net zero at the end of all.
You're only bringing up one of the quotes from the developers, everything else Herman states shows that Telltale was disappointed with the financial result of the game, despite that it was critically praised. Plus on top of that breaking even is not the same thing as making a highly profitable game, Herman saying that they weren't losing money but not making as much as they had hoped just further shows the disappointment Telltale has with the game.
He literally says "internally it was perceived as a failure" in the article
Is this why Tales took 3 months for each episode? Very disappointing to see this though. If a S2 ever arrives, hopefully it'll sell better than S1.
It's likely a big reason why if not THE reason, considering how small the team got by the end of the series according to this article.
I'm guessing that 4-5 month gap in between Episodes 1 and 2 especially was due to Episode 1 selling way less than they were hoping for
I think the long waits were caused by the constant revisions they were doing to respond to fan service and not "low sales"; don't forget that Walking Dead Season 2 and Wolf Among Us also had some really long waits.
Hopefully this was all due to the budget Telltale allocated for the project, that is if there was a limit from the start.
Having TFTB be a big deal financially is interesting, as I would have thought GoT was the biggest. Given that they used the real-life actors' likenesses, voices, and the music from the show, I assumed something of that scale was worse for them. But I guess HBO may have lended a hand in the acquisition of some of those licences.
That is so fucking sad. It would be even sadder if ANF got better sales than Tales. It did many better things than TWD and TWAU.
Actually I remember a post made by Job and he said that the reason for the long gap was because they didn't expect that the game would be so well received.
If you dig through the Waiting Thread for Episode 2, long enough, you might be able to find it.
GoT was clearly rushed. Poor performance, bugs and general ugliness of that game is the best proof.
TFTB, on the other hand, was polished. It performed so much better than your "average Telltale game". I guess that's the biggest problem with today's Telltale: quantity over quality.