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There were HUNDREDS of people working at Telltale?
How can you even put hundreds of people to work on a non-game that's nothing but pre-scripted model animations and a handful of voice actors? There are singular (1) people pumping out far more sophisticated model animations in Source Filmmaker as pronography. Granted, they use preexisting models, but it didn't take 300 people to make Telltale's character models, either.
There's a LOT I could comment on in that article, such as my complete lack of giving a fuck about no-talent hacks who are unable to pay their bills in an upscale trendy area they actually have no business in, but I'll restrain myself.
Screenshot: Kotaku (The Walking Dead: The Final Season)
Two weeks after Telltale Games laid off the bulk of its staff, the fate of the four-episode final season of the popular The Walking Dead series remains in question. Behind closed doors, the company continues to work on a deal that would provide for the third and fourth episodes to be finished by another company using former Telltale employees, according to two people familiar with negotiation. And the third episode is already nearly finished, those people said.
Telltale had already publicly said that it was working with “multiple potential partners” to complete and release episodes three and four after the studio laid off approximately 90% of its employees with no warning or severance in late September. On September 24, Telltale said through its company Twitter account that despite the “majority studio closure” that had just occurred, episode two would release as scheduled the next day, and that it was working to finish the remaining two. This triggered some anger among industry observers, raising questions over Telltale’s decision to outsource development of a game whose staff had just been left out in the cold.
The deal is more nuanced than originally assumed, however, according to two people with knowledge of ongoing discussions, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk about the negotiations. They characterized the deal taking shape as Telltale handing off the final two episodes to a separate company which would hire former Telltale employees on a contract basis to finish the game. It would be that company’s name on the paychecks, one said, and not, both claimed, a case of Telltale getting additional funds and spending it on development rather than paying severance to recently laid off employees.
Those two people also said that episode three of The Walking Dead’s final season is essentially finished. In fact, they said, it was scheduled for a ratings review, which traditionally happens in the final stages of a game’s development prior to being sent for platform certification and to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, on the very day the mass layoffs occurred. All it still needed was a couple weeks of polish.
Episode four was also on its way, those people said, with a first round of voice work for the main characters already recorded and a first review of a playable version planned for sometime around the end of September. “The script was strong and the whole team was excited about how we were finishing out Clem’s story,” one former developer told Kotaku. Episode three was originally planned to release on November 16, and episode four on December 18.
As for who exactly might return to finish the series, one former developer told Kotaku it would ideally be the entire original team but could also be as few as would be absolutely required to get the remaining episodes out the door. As negotiations drag on, however, it’s unclear who will still be available as ex-employees race to find new jobs. Many of those who were laid off last month, who had no warning and did not receive any form of severance payment, don’t have the luxury of sitting around waiting to see if they eventually get a phone call.
One person familiar with the deal said they originally expected to hear about an initial agreement by Friday, September 28. This was also the soft deadline Telltale had provided in a statement to Kotaku after pulling the already completed episodes of the series’ final season from store shelves.
“We’re currently still working to find a way to hand off production of episodes three and four so that the season can be completed,” a spokesperson for the company said at the time. That spokesperson has since also been laid off. “The outcome of those efforts will determine when and how The Final Season returns to stores. We hope to have a firm announcement before the end of the week.”
Telltale did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new timeline for a potential deal and what it might look like. One former developer stressed to Kotaku that the longer the talks take, the higher the risk the people who had been making The Walking Dead wouldn’t be around to finish it.
Report: Telltale Games lays off remaining 'skeleton crew'
October 4, 2018 | By Bryant Francis
When Telltale Games announced its 'majority studio closure' late last month, the only reason the studio seemed to hedge on the phrase 'shutting down' was that a small team would apparently remain at the company for a short time to finish contractually obligated work.
Gamasutra has reached out to Telltale for confirmation and more details. If you have been impacted by these layoffs, please feel free to reach out to us if you wish to share your story anonymously.
This is a developing story, we will update it with more details as they become clear.
UPDATE: Noel has since clarified via Twitter that these latest layoffs have not affected the entirety of the Telltale survivors.
"I think there was some misunderstanding about my earlier message," she wrote. "There are still good people at the company. MY team is done."
When asked what the remaining staff were working on, Noel said she was unsure. She was also asked how many Telltale employees are left, but only responded: "Not many."
Probably Skybound Entertainment, the company behind the original Walking Dead comics? They have video game division and published console versions of The Long Dark and Slime Rancher.
The final episodes for Telltale Games “The Walking Dead: The Final Season” will be released afterall, with Skybound taking over development and publishing of the game, “Walking Dead” creator and Skybound founder Robert Kirkman announced Saturday. Skybound also hopes to keep the original Telltale development team intact so they can be the ones to finish the season.
Skybound Games will work with members of the original Telltale team to finish the story, though nothing has yet been finalized, a spokesperson told Variety. Skybound never used in-house developers on its games before.
“We’ve successfully negotiated with Telltale Games for our company Skybound to come in and see Season 4 of the Telltale game to completion,” Kirkman told an audience at New York Comic-Con Saturday night. “We can’t lose Andrew Lincoln and Clementine in the same year.”
After the company dismissed controversial co-founder and CEO Kevin Bruner in March 2017, former Zynga SVP and GM of games Pete Hawley stepped in as Telltale’s CEO in September.
And I'm seeing news outlets reporting that Skybound will finish The Walking Dead Final Season episodes. I don't have a link for you because frankly I don't really give a shit about another SJW-infested studio going under.
It's nice when people are just wrong/stupid in the first few seconds of the video, so you can bail on it early. Saying "as far back as the nineties" when referring to adventure games means you couldn't even be bothered checking the Wikipedia page ffs, and the proclamation of modern games becoming more "interactive" is stupid in that context, particularly when discussing an "adventure" "game" studio like Telltale.
Skybound Games aims to finish The Walking Dead entirely with former Telltale staff Skybound CEO Ian Howe recently took part in a Walking Dead: The Final Season AMA.
Skybound Games revealed a couple of weeks ago that it would finish work on The Walking Dead: The Final Season, which had been left in limbo following the collapse of Telltale Games. It also committed to working with members of the Telltale development team on the project, a small bit of good news for at least some of its former employees.
In a recent AMA on Reddit, Skybound CEO Ian Howe went even further, saying that the goal is to build the entire TWD development team out of ex-Telltalers.
"The plan is for it to be staffed 100% by former Telltale staff, the only time we'd look elsewhere is if we can't fill a particular role from former TT people," Howe wrote. "I can't go into details but the team will be working directly for Skybound to complete game."
It won't be a wholesale transplant of the team from Telltale to Skybound, as Howe explained that "people roll on and off of projects" as their development progresses. "That means there are people who were on the team who were close to rolling off onto something else," he wrote. "It's unfair to ask someone to come back and do a couple of weeks work, especially if that would get in the way of another job offer, so this is just one example of some of the challenges we face."
The story itself will not be changed, however, and Clementine's story will conclude as it was meant to: "The process of developing the narrative isn’t changing, there is a long standing collaboration between the writers and Skybound over story approval and all the same people will still be involved."
There's no word as to when all of this will happen, as development hasn't actually resumed yet, and "until we're back into production, it's going to be nearly impossible to give an accurate [date]." But it may not be too much of a wait, as Howe said he expects Episode 3 to be out before the end of the year. "I'll be very disappointed if we can't make that happen," he said.
He also left the door open to DLC, or possibly even new Telltale-style games. "Our first priority it to complete the story, once we feel that we're in good shape to do that, we'll look at all the other possibilities and we love hearing the ideas and suggestions," he said.
"There [is] nothing in active development yet, but we're always talking about how we can tell interesting stories in games. I'm really spending a lot of time at the moment looking at new technologies and how that can allow us to deliver strong narrative based games."
A post-mortem of Telltale Games Speaking at Sweden Game Conference 2018, former Telltale narrative designer Emily Grace Buck says it's time for a “really serious conversation about potentially starting a union”
Extensive rewrites days before going gold, crunch culture, a fear of being replaced, and a "fundamental misunderstanding" of its audience are just part of the picture for what brought about the demise of Telltale Games, according to former narrative designer Emily Grace Buck.
Speaking this week during a presentation at the Sweden Game Conference in Skövde, Buck offered insight into what happened to the award-winning studio of 270 staff that collapsed overnight.
While Buck conceded that she is not a spokesperson for the other former employees, and the closure of Telltale was multi-faceted and more complicated than any one thing, her words offer a rough post-mortem.
Back in November last year, Telltale laid off around 25 per cent of its staff, something which Buck said "got handled, honestly, about as well as a layoff could be handled". Those affected were given severance, and healthcare coverage through to the end of year; there was a even a job fair.
Emily Grace Buck
The lay offs on September 21, however, couldn't have been more different, said Buck. The entire company was called in for a morning meeting where the CEO Pete Hawley announced that 90 per cent of staff were being let go and had 30 minutes to leave the building, with no severance and healthcare coverage for only nine more days.
Just the day before, Telltale management was holding on to hopes that either AMC or Smilegate would come through with funding to keep the studio open; both pulled out within hours of each other, quickly followed by existing investor Lionsgate writing off its investment. From there, one of the HR personnel ended up staying until 3am that night, making redundancy packets for everybody, including herself.
Buck, who had been episode two design lead for The Walking Dead: The Final Season, and was also working on season two of The Wolf Among Us, said that although there was a supportive, "family environment" at the studio, there was also a problem with crunch culture, especially during the first two of her three years there.
Drawing comparisons to the recent Rockstar controversy, Buck refuted co-founder Dan Houser's comments that it was only a small team of senior writers "who work very hard purely because they're passionate about a project".
"As a person who has been on that 'small team' of lead writers and narrative designers re-doing things, let me tell you that can be catastrophic for the rest of the team," said Buck. "We often, at Telltale, after executive reviews, had to do 90 per cent rewrites of the game."
She added that rewriting anywhere between 60 and 90 per cent of a game was common occurrence, sometimes days before being sent off for certification, creating a whole host of problems for the downstream teams.
"Telltale Games often got knocked for being very buggy and having a lot of frame skips," said Buck. "Yes, we had some of those, but a lot of the time what people thought were frame skips or buggy parts of our engine, were actually scenes that had gotten redone so last minute, that there was no time to smooth out the cinematography or the animation.... what you were seeing was not a product of a buggy engine, but buggy management system."
So what went wrong? Buck believes that one of the biggest problems was a "fundamental misunderstanding of who our audience was" among most, though not all, of the executive leadership.
Both Minecraft: Story Mode, and Guardians of the Galaxy were games where this misunderstanding were apparent, said Buck. The first two episodes of Minecraft: Story Mode were originally M-rated, and had to be rewritten; in this case, Buck said, it was fortunate as it was clearly misaligned with the younger target demographic of Minecraft.
[UPDATE]: After the publication of this article, Buck posted on Twitter that she had been mistaken on Mincraft: Story Mode, and that it was originally intended to be rated T, not M, saying, "I played it, & it was not appropriate for young kids... but not that raunchy. My deepest apologies for the wrong information."[/UPDATE]
With Guardians of the Galaxy, however, it was almost the exact opposite. Much like the source material, which the creative team studied extensively in order to try and capture the tone and feel of the universe, the original draft of the game was funnier and more "goofy", but that was all stripped out to lean into a darker, grittier feel, that was tonally off from the franchise.
"Our executive team insisted that what was popular about Guardians of the Galaxy, was darkness and violence, and sadness," said Buck. "And that people did not associate humour with that brand... So we redid the first two episodes to be less funny and more dark and more violent and more sad, and that's the game that shipped. And one of the biggest comments in editorial, was that it felt very off-tone for Guardians of the Galaxy and wasn't very funny. And we were like 'we know'."
Originally geared towards an older audience before release, Buck said people began asking: 'Why are there dick jokes in my Minecraft?
But this highlighted another core problem within Telltale, Buck added; it's not just the "fundamental misunderstanding" from the executive team, but also an unwillingness to listen, and on the occasions they did, "it was very, very often an uphill battle, and one that was scary to fight".
"If you fought it too hard, you would be taken off a project, replaced, or even let go, and that happened to people on a number of occasions," said Buck. "So we were trying as hard as possible to cater to who our executive team thought out fanbase was, this core gamer-type audience. And we did cultivate a pretty large audience of that type as well all of the other types of people."
After Telltale laid off 90 per cent of its staff, things quickly began to spiral. Buck, who had inadvertently found herself at the centre of the fallout, became subject to harassment through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even angry phone calls from entitled fans.
"I'd wake up to a thousand notifications, many of them targeted harassment at me for not finishing the game I wasn't even working on anymore at the time the studio closed," said Buck
Worse still, Telltale is located in Marin County, near San Francisco, and is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, with a one-bedroom apartment costing around $2,500 a month to rent.
While there was an effort from the wider industry to help, with #TelltaleJobs trending on Twitter, and hundreds of studios offering assistance, including 37 which showed up for a jobs fair with less than a week's notice, only 20 per cent of those laid off have found new work.
"It's happening. It's creating a lot of good, but it has not been as overwhelmingly successful and immediate as some of media has [made it] seem," said Buck. "A lot of people are still looking for work. A lot of people haven't got that many interviews yet, especially some of our more junior staff."
Buck admitted that in another context this 20 per cent re-employment rate would be "really good", but with no severance, no healthcare, no notice, and extremely high-living costs, there are a lot of people who have been left out in the cold.
"How do we start holding leadership accountable to the people who work for their company?" asked Buck. "How do we convince them to stop gambling with our livelihoods in an attempt to get more funding? Because quite frankly... at Telltale that's kind of what happened. Those weren't done deals. It was always possible that they could fall through. That's how deals work...
"So I'm not going to say this is the only answer, or even necessarily the best answer, but especially in the United States, where your work is tied to your healthcare, I think we need to have a really serious conversation about potentially starting a union."
After underlining quite how unpopular unions are in the United States, her comments met with a round of applause from the audience.
"Something needs to shift in the way that companies in the US are treating their workers," she continued. "I mean not just in games, but definitely in games."
The recent SAG-AFTRA strikes, which saw video game voice actors protest, and ultimately win a case for receiving a cut of a game's profits, highlights an unfair disparity within the industry, Buck argued. She added that many voice actors suggested it was something which developers should also be pushing for.
"It would at least be nice to have some sort of safety network to rely on if you end up out in the cold unable to pay rent," she said, addressing the audience. "We need to have a conversation. We need to talk about what our options are. We deserve a lot better than what happened at Telltale. Not just the Telltale devs, but everyone in the gaming community...
"We deserve a lot better than what this industry is giving us right now, and I hope that by listening to this talk, you're thinking about what's going on at your own company. If you know the finances, are you confident that you can take care of everyone? Are you someone who mandates extra long hours? Are you someone who voluntarily works extra long hours to show that you're passionate, and might be accidentally creating a culture of overwork at your company? Are you someone who might want to start to form a union?"
Despite growing ever larger, the games industry is "so tight knit" Buck concluded. "There are more of us than ever before but we're so deeply interconnected all over the world, let's help each other out as much as we can."
CORRECTION: The reference to the SAG-AFTRA strike is incorrect. While actors did not win a share of a game's profits, they did secure a new bonus pay structure depending on how many recording sessions are needed.
Nay, just delisted from the store. This will mean that if you search for it you can't find it and you'd have to get a direct link to the page in order to buy it, like what happened with Skyrim Standard Edition when they released Skyrim Special Edition. It's either that or they just remove it from being sold.
Today is a glorious day! They're pulling Telltale's products from Steam.
Looks like they're going for a complete resection: The Walking Dead series, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future and Tales of Monkey Island are already gone, more are (hopefully) soon to follow!
Today is a glorious day! They're pulling Telltale's products from Steam.
Looks like they're going for a complete resection: The Walking Dead series, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future and Tales of Monkey Island are already gone, more are (hopefully) soon to follow!
How does it work when a company shuts down but its games are still on sale? If noone else picks up the IP, where do the profits of defunct companies go if there is not reciever and administration left?
I don't think it's confirmed that the company has gone bankrupt. In theory the owners could shut down the studio and continue to earn money from the back catalog (like what Herve does with Interplay's games)
Telltale Games is closing, liquidation underway and games being removed from Steam
The story is ending, and the process to close up shop began in early October.
Telltale Games is going through assignment proceedings, a process similar to bankruptcy, but designed to move quickly and settle the company's affairs. The writing has been on the wall for some time, but a company by the name of Sherwood Partners is expected to handle the process of winding Telltale Games down completely. Sherwood has initiated contact with anyone who might have a claim on Telltale's assets.
GameDaily spoke on the phone with Sherwood Partners co-founder Martin Pitchinson. During the call, he confirmed that Sherwood will be handling Telltale’s liquidation.
“It’s just that someone doesn’t make it to the finish line,” he says. “Is it sad? Yes. It’s a whole new world.”
Assignment is a different mechanism for closing a company than bankruptcy. "A company can go out of business without going bankrupt," says attorney and Odin Law & Media founder Brandon Huffman. "All that means is that they were able to find someone to give them enough money for assets to pay any creditors or they had the money on hand."
Assignment takes a different path than bankruptcy. Creditors were likely been looped in prior to completing the arrangement with Sherwood Partners.
"As you can probably tell, Assignment for the benefit of creditors" (ABCs) in California are not a court-based process," says attorney Richard Heog of Hoeg Law. "Because of that you can think of them in a similar manner to arbitration—rather than trial—as a way for the parties to streamline the process. The difficulty is that the creditors are not limited in the same way they are when a company formally declares bankruptcy, and further such an assignment—like a bankruptcy—will typically trigger a default under the company’s commercial contracts. So, in general, Telltale would need to have consulted with their creditors and had them agree to this course of action before Telltale undertook it—if they are getting good counsel on this."
Additionally, a former employee tells GameDaily that post-employment health insurance—called COBRA—mandated by law will end for all former eligible Telltale staff on November 30, 2018. COBRA insurance, which the former employees are required to pay for—but employers are required to provide—typically lasts for 18 months. When companies liquidate, their health insurance agreeements typically end. In this case it leaves potentially hundreds of people without even a way to pay for their own healthcare after having company-supported coverage taken away when Telltale laid off 250 staff and contractors in September 2018.
Following the mass layoffs, Telltale CEO Pete Hawley told me via Twitter that the company would carry on with 25 employees "foreseeable." With the assignment, it appears that despite Hawley's indication that Telltale would continue on with a skeleton crew, the end is rapidly approaching. Hawley's Twitter account appears to have been deleted or the named changed.
Source: Twitter
Telltale become the subject of a WARN act lawsuit related to the mass layoffs. The suit was filed both at the federal level and in the state of California. As we previously reported, the California case has a better chance of success.
A copy of the assignment agreement, which appears to be signed by Telltale CEO Pete Hawley, follows.
It appears that Telltale is assigning all of its assets, including physical goods, trademarks, copyrights, software, and source code. The agreement may be an abridged document, as it does not detail what Telltale has received in return for the assignment. No specific amounts have been detailed. A more complete agreement may exist out of the public view.
"You wouldn’t assign everything you own to someone else, unless you were getting something for it," Huffman says. Alternatively, the assignee, Telltale, LLC, might not be due any consideration.
"Telltale LLC is probably just a shell company that will hold the assets for purposes of selling them off. the liquidation company may even be the owner of that LLC," Huffman suggests. "It's also possible that the company will go bankrupt and that they're only remaining income for their creditors will be whatever the liquidation company pays them under any other arrangement they might have."
It also seems that some of Telltale's back catalog are being removed from Steam. Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and many others are still live. However Back to the Future and Tales of Monkey Island are currently unavailable.
According to a letter dated November 11, 2018, that was sent to creditors and shareholders, anyone with a claim against Telltale's assets has until April 9, 2019 to submit proof. Additionally, the letter indicates that the assignment agreement began a month prior, on October 11, 2018. The 30-day period between these two events is standard per California Civil Code of Procedure 1802.
Source: Anonymous Former Telltale Employee
GameDaily has reached out to Telltale for comment. The company did not respond by publication.
