The Struggles of Telltale Games

[Zondares]

The Verge published an excellent article today about Telltale Games. It goes into pretty great depth about their perceived decline in quality since they broke out in a big way with The Walking Dead, attributing a lot of the faults to poor management and stretching themselves thin. It’s well worth a read if you’ve ever been a fan of the studio’s games, or even if you’ve always struggled to put up with their uneven narratives, choppy performance, or banal design.

 

Campo Santo (Firewatch, In the Valley of the Gods) and Night School Studio (Oxenfree, Afterparty) are two developers that were formed from high-profile Telltale Games departures. You can see where a lot of Telltale’s narrative-design strengths went with their released works.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry

Edited March 21, 2018 by Zondares
Typo

[Asvinia]

I've not read all of it yet but it seems really interesting.

I imagine a lot of what happened in Telltale happens in other video game companies. It seems this industry is not one of the most fun to work in, having the 'men in suits' interfere with games and make them worse with profit in mind, versus the people making the games and wanting to make them good. The industry as a whole would probably be better off without the crunch times pushed by publishers or other investors, and as mentioned in this article, stressed people burn out and they or the people left behind can't make the same games as before.

[MidnightDragon]

I think part of it was them trying to tackle too much shit at once, which they did mention. Interesting read.

[BEANO_BRFC]

Must admit i prefered TellTale when they made actual point n clickers like The Special Editions of Monkey Island, Strong Bad, Sam n Max and Tales Of Monkey Island. 

[Yrva]

The decline in consistent quality of TellTale games was very apparent to a lot of people, myself included, but I never really knew why until now! I adored the original Walking Dead game and the Tales from the Borderlands game, but everything else has been less than great, unfortunately. Hopefully TellTale can get back into form someday.