The End of Telltale Games

Telltale Games, a beloved independent company in the gaming community fired half of its staff last Friday September 21, 2018.

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Benjamin Souza, Contributer

Telltale Games, a beloved independent company in the gaming community fired half of its staff last Friday, September 21, 2018.  The company, which is the master of creating a narrative through their characters’ conversations, took a heavy blow. Half of their staff hit the road, leaving fans concerned about the future of Telltale altogether because, to most gamers, this company made some of the most quality games to date. So what happened?

“We released some of our best content this year and received a tremendous amount of positive feedback, but ultimately, that did not translate to sales,” stated chief executive, Pete Hawley, in a statement on Friday.

So where does this leave our beloved company in the future? Well, as expected, Telltale did not respond to any other questions. So to fill this gap in your heart I’ll fill in what I believe will happen to Telltale Games. I believe that their company will now hurtle in a downward spiral until they fade into obscurity. I’m aware this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but with Telltale themselves believing this, it is hard to stay optimistic. Telltale wasn’t always heading down this rocky slope; Telltale’s career boomed when the “Walking Dead series,” which was named game of the year by publications like USA Today and Wired, led Telltale to nearly double the size of its offices and expand to 400 employees.

Games like the “Walking Dead” had players emotionally hooked on the game and story. Millions of people wanted to find out what happened to these fictional characters next. This series dragged out to its fourth season with each episode spanning from an hour and thirty minutes to two hours. It was a time of immense success for Telltale; no one could have ever thought that this gaming giant could be taken down until it smashed them across the face with defeat.

After this event, Telltale shut down the creation of all their projects: “The Walking Dead”, “The Wolf Among Us”, and more.  This left the only project left standing “Minecraft Story Mode”, which is being kept alive by a skeleton crew of twenty-five people. “The Walking Dead” story that put Telltale on the map is now doomed to go unfinished, and the people who pre-ordered the game will go without refunds. The gamers aren’t the only ones outraged and disappointed; more than half of Telltales employees were fired without warning, and without severance pay. Most of these employees lived paycheck to paycheck,  had families and children, and will now go hungry. People were forced to move out of their homes and go across the country due to the fact they could no longer afford to live in their houses.

Many of the Telltale developers took to Twitter in search of another job out of desperation; many of them telling their stories of working late nights just for all of their work to be thrown away. Major companies like Ubisoft, Playerunknown, and more have been reaching out to find jobs for everyone involved. The weird part about this whole ordeal that caught everyone off guard was the fact Telltale was hiring new staff two weeks prior to this collapse. All of this chaos could have been avoided if they were just open about what was happening to their company. This is just some sloppy work from the studio executives.