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Telltale Games, the studio behind a number of recent adventure titles such as Batman: The Telltale Series, every season of The Walking Dead, and Minecraft: Story Mode have laid off about 90 staff members today, or about 25% of their total workforce."Our industry has shifted in tremendous ways over the past few years. The realities of the environment we face moving forward demand we evolve, as well, reorienting our organization with a focus on delivering fewer, better games with a smaller team," said Telltale Games CEO Pete Hawley.
"I'd like to express our respect for all the contributions that these incredibly talented artists, storytellers and more have made to this company, and that this decision is in no way a reflection on the quality or dedication of their work. We have made available our full career assistance services to help our affected colleagues and friends - and their families - navigate this difficult transition as quickly as possible."
"I'd like to express our respect for all the contributions that these incredibly talented artists, storytellers and more have made to this company, and that this decision is in no way a reflection on the quality or dedication of their work. We have made available our full career assistance services to help our affected colleagues and friends - and their families - navigate this difficult transition as quickly as possible."
The statement says that this is being done to "make the company more competitive as a developer and publisher of groundbreaking story driven gaming experience with an emphasis on high quality in the years ahead." Telltale is also looking to move towards "more proven technologies that will fast-track innovation in its core products."
As always, best of luck to all employees that have been impacted by this today.
Here's a crazy idea; Take the awesome stories Telltale tends to have and actually give them some alternate paths and endings and then take those to mobile games and tablets. Also, have other characters you can play as to go through the story.
It may also be hard to get licensing, but there are also quite a few movies to spin from to continue stories or take other characters through. They should have jumped on the comic book fad years ago.
I could understand if they were making any other product, which their statement is using that as the excuse, but Telltale does some things others don't and bring something a bit unique to single player. They were in a good position to do some innovative thing.
I've felt even from the first season of The Walking Dead that the choices in Telltale games were superficial at best. I never bothered to complete TWD Season 2 or even The Wolf Among Us because I grew exceedingly tired of the whole formula. Same reason I never even bothered with the Game of Thrones or Batman games. I knew my choices didn't matter. It's also why I felt that something like Life is Strange was a breath of fresh air. It actually felt like my choices mattered, for the most part, in that game.
Although I didn't expect a local audience feature to work at all, until I saw Hidden Agenda. Now that's a game with some thought put into it before implementation. Telltale's audience feature from its inception as an idea, was already a waste of time.
While certainly not the cause of massive layoffs, it does hint that maybe Telltale doesn't exactly know what they're doing beyond acquiring licenses.