Report: The Walking Dead developer Telltale Games closing down

[42 Monks]

Why would they? They have a huge studio making games no one is buying.

Exactly. Their last Batman joint bombed and their niche stuff isn't moving the needle

They'll let the studio die and poach the individual talent as the dust settles.

 

[Sonny Bonds]

Why did they keep doing the exact same thing if they weren't making a profit? Why?

 

[Nymbus]

patiently waiting for Quantic dream to drop some more heat

 

[Dirty Mcdrawz]

Gawddamn no wonder they're dead!

Jesus...

 

[TheGreatShowtime]

That Game of Thrones game they put out was such a piece of shyt. I was legit heated at the end of it because I wasted a year waiting for that trash to play out.

 

[daze23]

Like me

I'd be pissed too

it's gonna be interesting to see what happens. I don't think people are going to be happy about not getting what they paid for

 

[Artificial Intelligence]

.......................

 

[42 Monks]

I still can't believe The Wolf Among Us is their only solo product...

 

[Judo]

They been having problems for a long ass time. I think ever since the first CEO was doing some shyt IIRC? The whole company seem like a really big mess after some shyt when down. I remember reading up on story about what was going on, but they really been hanging on a thread for a long ass time. It's crazy how they still went forward with the final season, despite having huge issues in their engine. Me playing the lost frontier was a horrible experience with that crazy ass backpack bug that expanded across the entire area of the room in the game. Some people had to reset the game several times to make it disappear, including me. :justinreallytho:

 

[42 Monks]

They been having problems for a long ass time. I think ever since the first CEO was doing some shyt IIRC? The whole company seem like a really big mess after some shyt when down. I remember reading up on story about what was going on, but they really been hanging on a thread for a long ass time. It's crazy how they still went forward with the final season, despite having huge issues in their engine. Me playing the lost frontier was a horrible experience with that crazy ass backpack bug that expanded across the entire area of the room in the game. Some people had to reset the game several times to make it disappear, including me. :justinreallytho:

what are you actually talking about im more curious than anything but like cmon. issues, problems, some shyt, what was going on, big mess.... what are you talking about

This format would be perfect for VR.. to bad that hasnt taken off yet or they couldve shifted there .. oculus or sony should buy em out

shyt, if anything they should've went mobile

VR isn't propping anyone up and won't be for a long time if at all. Even Quantic Dream dropped the idea two years ago and opted to wait until the title after Detroit to actually explore it further.

 

[daze23]

I still can't believe The Wolf Among Us is their only solo product...

it was based on those Fables comics

 

[ezrathegreat]

Clementine!

 

[Dirty Mcdrawz]

I still can't believe The Wolf Among Us is their only solo product...

They actually have no ips that weren’t licensed..

 

[42 Monks]

it was based on those Fables comics

They actually have no ips that weren’t licensed..

 

[Judo]

what are you actually talking about im more curious than anything but like cmon. issues, problems, some shyt, what was going on, big mess.... what are you talking about

shyt, if anything they should've went mobile

VR isn't propping anyone up and won't be for a long time if at all. Even Quantic Dream dropped the idea two years ago and opted to wait until the title after Detroit to actually explore it further.

My bad breh. Basically just bad management all around:

The culture of the company changed dramatically as a result. Former employees describe Telltale in its early days as a small, tight-knit group with a strong sense of camaraderie. New hires trickled in slowly. Upper management had been much less involved in the day-to-day, and developers were given more freedom to do their jobs as they saw best. But the success of The Walking Dead spurred the company to expand rapidly: in order to suit both its growing ambitions and keep investors happy, it became a company that many long-standing employees no longer recognized. “We went from a small and scrappy team to kind of a giant studio full of 300-plus people,” says former Telltale programmer and designer Andrew Langley, who worked at the studio from 2008 to 2015. “You walk around the office, and you don’t really recognize anybody anymore.”

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.”

As Telltale became more prolific, it took on more and more simultaneous projects.
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.

To keep up with the workload, the company started rotating developers in and out of different games during the development process, sometimes in ways that employees say made little sense. 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.

Time management was a major issue. Release dates would often slip after games underwent multiple, extensive reviews that came with a great deal of feedback, but failed to budget enough time to make the changes. “The pace at which the studio operated was both an amazing feat and its biggest problem,” says a former employee. “Executives would often ask teams to rewrite, redesign, recast, and reanimate up until the very last minute without properly adjusting the schedule. The demands on production only became more intense with each successful release, and at some point, you just don’t have anything left to give.”

“Crunch culture” is well-documented and endemic in the game industry, and Telltale was no exception. Some former employees reported working 14- to 18-hour days or coming in every day of the week for weeks on end. But where most developers go into “crunch mode” in the final months of a game leading up to its launch, they described it as constant. Because of the episodic nature of Telltale’s games, the studio’s development cycle was a constantly turning wheel. As soon as one episode wrapped, it was on to the next one, over and over with no end in sight.

Developers who were given a six-day-a-week schedule that lasted months typically felt they had two choices: quit or suck it up. “What happens is the people who give a fukk the most are the people who pay the price,” says a former employee. “[People who] take a lot of pride in this product are the people who are going to kill themselves. And those are the people you really don’t want killing themselves because they have the most value in the company.”

More than half a dozen sources across the company also talked about a perceived culture of underpayment, citing salaries below industry standards that also required living in the notoriously expensive Bay Area. Issues of crunch and underpayment were particularly pervasive for the cinematics team, which was staffed by many junior members who had come straight from college.

In addition to Vanaman and Rodkin, who are often cited as two of the biggest creative losses for the studio, the resources at the company were diminished by other high-profile departures, including Adam Hines, Chuck Jordan, Dave Grossman, and Mike Stemmle. Earlier in 2017, veteran employees Dennis Lenart, Pierre Shorette, Nick Herman, and Adam Sarasohn left the studio simultaneously and moved to Ubisoft. Between the four of them, they’d worked on some of the studio’s most successful games. Their absences left a vacuum of creative leadership. “These people who have been the stewards of the creative torch at Telltale, when they leave, it’s like, who the fukk do we have left?” one source says.

Bruner worked primarily as a programmer prior to Telltale, including during his stint at LucasArts. But he wore many hats during his time at Telltale: first as the company’s CTO and later as a director and CEO. According to numerous current and former employees, Bruner’s behavior became significantly more abrasive and inflexible after the success of The Walking Dead. Thanks to his background in programming, he had been a strong force in creating game development tools for Telltale. As the studio’s popularity exploded, some employees felt he wanted to step into the role of a design auteur, which sources say made him resistant to give the spotlight to other employees at the company.

“That’s when things got really bad,” says a former employee. “I think a lot of the insecurity came from The Walking Dead.” The game’s success had significantly raised the profiles of Rodkin and Vanaman and earned them widespread praise. “I think that that really irked [Bruner] a lot,” says the source. “He felt that… he deserved that. It was his project, or it was his company. He should have gotten all that love.”

Some say Bruner’s behavior led Rodkin and Vanaman to ultimately leave after the wildly successful first season of The Walking Dead. “They were tired of fighting with [Bruner],” says a source with direct knowledge. They jumped into indie development and founded their own studio called Campo Santo, where they released the award-winning game Firewatch. One source points to Campo Santo’s success, along with Night School Studios and its supernatural thriller Oxenfree — co-created by former Telltale veteran Adam Hines — as a catalyst for Bruner’s tightening grip.

Here's the site to read the rest: Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

That studio was a fukking mess.