Telltale Games is no more. The story is still developing, but it’s undeniably a bad situation. Scores of people have lost their jobs with no warning. This is a tragedy, but I’m struck with just how surprised some people are. In the latest post from @AskAGameDev, the question was: “What do you think about the Telltale closure? I thought their games were successful.”

It seems there are people who don’t understand how this can happen, so what I want to look at is how things could get to this point, and hopefully point out a couple under

Setting the Foundation

Before they were a bit of a darling, Telltale made lesser known games. I first paid attention to them when they did Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People. These titles met with… mixed results… In order to draw an audience they were relying on licensed IPs. These bring in all sorts of risks. You have to pay the owner of the IP to use it, adhere to any requirements they may have about the content, and even then you always run the risk of the owner rejecting rejecting your work, forcing you back to the drawing board for a redesign. Telltale was not finding runaway success… yet.

The Walking Dead was a whole other deal. This was a huge success and brought a lot of money into the company. It seems that things turn a big turn here.  On on extreme, when a studio finds themselves with a ton of money they’ll set up a war chest that will last them for years. (See 3D Realms and the production of Duke Nukem Forever) A moderate response could be to ramp up a bit, improving your internal skill sets with nigh level talent, increase advertising, and retain a reasonable war chest. Telltale on the other hand went to the other extreme.

Telltale invested back into itself heavily, even recklessly. They hired a TON of people to produce a TON of new titles. They quadrupled down on the idea of licensed properties, releasing new chapters on new platforms at a breakneck pace. Rapid expansion like that is rarely a healthy idea. Consumers started seeing the writing quality drop, and limits in the engine start to show.

It All Comes Down to Management

Jumping ahead, in late 2017 Telltale laid off 1/4 of its workforce. There’s a good article from The Verge from March 2018 talking about the layoffs that Telltale had gone through in 2017. There are a few sections that really struck me.

As Telltale became more prolific, it took on more and more simultaneous projects. In 2013, it released episodes of The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead: Season 2. In late 2014, it launched episodes from its newly procured licenses with Game of Thrones and Borderlands that would stretch into 2015, along with a Minecraftgame. As 2016 rolled into 2017, it also took on Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more seasons of The Walking Dead and Minecraft. One employee described a T-shirt that the studio distributed with its episode release dates as so packed that it looked it was promoting a concert tour.

There’s an odd effect that this had. Telltale saturated their own market with their own output. Fans of the studio probably weren’t going to keep up with this output.

Sources say the culture of the studio never properly adapted from its indie mentality to one more appropriate for its larger size. Tribal knowledge persisted over clearly documented processes, and a lack of communication among employees bred confusion. “Very rarely people were writing things down on a wiki or a confluence page or any sort of documentation,” says a former employee. “People were shifting so often that you would hear a version of a story that was actually weeks old, and the person telling you has no idea because that’s the last thing they heard.”

Office culture is set from the top, but it is also reflected by the people brought in. When hiring is done too rapidly, less attention is paid to how well a team will function together. Unless things are very carefully managed, little factions will form. When that happens cooperation suffers, knowledge won’t be shared, and the work is compromised.

“As the developer’s schedule grew more aggressive, management sought to remedy tighter turnarounds by adding more people to the department — a “solution” that did little to help the problem. As one former Telltale developer put it: nine women can’t make a baby in one month. “Focus on quality really started to shift to ‘let’s just get as many episodes out as we can,’” the source says.”

Ramping up production by throwing more hours at it isn’t a linear function. There is a point of diminishing returns, and it sounds like Telltale was far to the wrong side of that curve.

The Last Year

In March 2017, Kevin Bruner was removed as CEO of Telltale. This would be a step in the process to try to correct the course of the company. Then, as mentioned, Telltale had a 25% layoff late in 2017. This is never a great sign, but if a company has overstaffed so aggressively, then it’s not out of the question to correct like this. Reduce headcount, reduce the number of projects, and focus on better quality. Also considering the fact that Telltale was getting a reputation for dropping quality in their writing due to over production, this move at least makes sense on paper.

Here’s the thing, though… If the quality was disappointing, the number of sales will go down. Considering these titles are still all licensed IP, it’s easy to wind up losing money on a game, even a game that looks successful otherwise. It’s now clear that Telltale was losing money on a number of these releases. The dysfunctional office atmosphere would lead to brain drain as key people would get fed up and leave. Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, two important contributors to The Walking Dead, left in 2013, and I would be surprised if other important personnel didn’t leave in the subsequent years as well.

Things seemed to be going well. The writing seemed to be received better, and the overproduction was slowing down. A deal with Netflix to give the Telltale treatment to Stranger Things was sparking imaginations. But then it was announced that things would be shutting down. Why would that happen?

This is just supposition on my part, but I think there were some persisting issues with office culture, and possibly writing quality, that upset the Stranger Things deal. If that were proceeding, it is probable that Netflix would have given Telltale funds to begin production, which would have kept the studio alive for at least another couple months. If that deal fell through, then it’s not a shock that the funds would have dried up very fast.

This is far from the only possibility. I’ve already seen some others posted that are compelling. However this was my first reaction, it hasn’t been contradicted (as of the time of this writing) and I still don’t see many people talking about this possibility, so consider it food for though.

Legacy

No matter what happens, and no matter who’s to blame, it’s worth remembering that The Walking Dead came out before “Gone Home”, “The Stanley Parable”, “Everyone’s Gone to Rapture”, or even “Life is Strange”. Telltale Games helped to build a bridge that took us from old school adventure games to a current crop of narrative driven games. That is a legacy that goes beyond the achievements of one game. Their work helped to re-shape the industry, and we are all richer for it.

Kynetyk is a veteran of the games industry.  Behind the Line is to help improve understanding of what goes on in the game development process and the business behind it.  From “What’s taking this game so long to release”, to “why are there bugs”, to “Why is this free to play” or anything else, if there is a topic that you would like to see covered, please write in to kynetyk@enthusiacs.com or follow on twitter @kynetykknows