The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us are two games which earned Telltale Games critical acclaim, but running a games studio in 2018 is an expensive endeavour, and making good games isn’t enough.
After losing 25% of its staff last year, it looks as if only 25 staff will remain on board for the coming months to finish work on The Walking Dead: Season 4, and then they, too, will walk off into the sunset.
Telltale Games took to Twitter earlier today to confirm the news:
— Telltale Games (@telltalegames) September 21, 2018
Mobile gaming in particular is such a volatile industry where amazing games with stunning 3D visuals can perform poorly against fairly simple puzzlers and the like. All this points to Telltale’s style of game development simply not being profitable, nor agile enough to pivot into more profitable gaming styles. Arguably there’s some moral ground in not selling in-app purchases of mindless random loot and in-app coins, jewels and whatever else, but at the same time, that stuff pays the bills.
wolf among us 2…hopefully some big company would reborn it to make more games
Telltale’s earlier games were fairly decent and somewhat reminiscent of the Lucas Arts / Sierra adventure game days. Whilst their recent releases are fantastic visually, they’re practically low-budget animated films, that pause frequently to make to click on things i.e. These games have practically zero game-play. It’s a shame, but it’s really not too surprising given they would have been spending a fair wad on licensing IP and 3D assets, but presumably investing practically nothing in game design.