Telltale Games Closing Down - Rumors at the moment

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That Chris Guy said:
The issue I had with Telltale Games was how - at least with The Walking Dead - your choices felt meaningless. You couldn't save Duck or his mother, and about 80% of the cast still died regardless of what you said or did with them, so in the end you were just listening to a few different dialogue boxes of an otherwise linear outcome.

Was The Wolf Among Us any better in that respect? I got it downloaded for free, but I never tried it out.
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From what playthroughs I've seen, the only choices that really matter are those that directly affect the protagonist (i.e. if they end up dying, resulting in game over). And even those feel more like afterthoughts than any actual progression because they don't give you the opportunity to do something different, like a different event or just bypassing events altogether, just the quicktime event you die on to get the story going again.

Honestly, Telltale doesn't know what non-linear storytelling is, but I think we all know that by this point.
 
Baldur's Gait said:
When you get into the other games though, it becomes extremely egregious. Batman is probably the worst in this regard, since you could try and save Harvey but he still becomes Two-Face. How cool would it have been to have a Harvey Dent who never became evil? There's so much untapped potential in those game by having players make their own twisted continuity, but it's even more restrictive than Walking Dead than anything.
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The vast majority of players chose to save Catwoman in that scene because pretty much everyone knew that Harvey would turn into Two-Face regardless of what you did because it's Telltale, and of course that's exactly what ended up happening in later episodes. Lmao.
 
i think the thing that killed this studio (and pardon me if it's already been said) is that they've basically created the same game except in different universes. before that, they at least had poker night at the inventory
 
vertexwindi said:
The vast majority of players chose to save Catwoman in that scene because pretty much everyone knew that Harvey would turn into Two-Face regardless of what you did because it's Telltale, and of course that's exactly what ended up happening in later episodes. Lmao.
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See, I saved Harvey because I was extremely curious where that road led. It's the ultimate tease, really. What would happen if Batman's greatest ally was never scarred? In every version of the character, it was the scarring that led to his breaking point. In Telltale's universe, he'd still be evil anyway. In fact, it makes even less sense since the game is still trying to make him evil, but without him getting scarred it's so much weaker so they have to make up bullshit reasons. That one choice reflects how limited and restricted your choices actually are.
 
I can't say I'm sorry to see Telltale bite the dust, but it's hard to deny that they left a pretty big impact on gaming. They're basically the modern day Sierra - they had one or two games that were really successful and then they spent the next several years pumping out tons of sequels with basically identical gameplay and no real innovation to speak of to a rapidly dwindling audience. In about 20 years or so I bet people are going to look back on games like The Walking Dead and say "man, remember when we thought this was amazing?"
 
To y'all here claiming Telltale made a mistake making a Minecraft game: it was one of their top hits. Kids asked their parents for it and played it on their eggsboxes.
https://twitter.com/joeparlock/status/1043225636788158465
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Don't underestimate the pure unfiltered power of adolescent autism.
 
DieselBoogaloo said:
To y'all here claiming Telltale made a mistake making a Minecraft game: it was one of their top hits. Kids asked their parents for it and played it on their eggsboxes.
https://twitter.com/joeparlock/status/1043225636788158465
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Don't underestimate the pure unfiltered power of adolescent autism.
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I'm not sure if I buy that. It looks like it moved ~2 million units (let's say 2 million x $20 = $40,000,000) which was broken up by by however much they paid to license Minecraft (a property that microsoft valued at $2.5 billion) which is an unknown number but some estimates get up to $10,000,000 [25%].

Development was alleged to start in 2013 (with pre-development and negotations starting in 2012) for a late 2015 release that didn't release the final episode until late 2016. That's a nearly three year window for a studio with near 300 employees. Although it's probably not every employee was working on this game, TellTale's release schedule would indicate otherwise as the two games preceeding it were wrapping up as this one started. Only two games launched inside of the Minecraft window; a small 3-episode Walking Dead spinoff and Batman (near the end of Minecraft).

Even if we're conservative and assume the team was 150 people, that's likely ($50,000 in salary * 150 employees * 3 years) getting us to $22,500,000 which is a bit conservative considering that the average employee there likely made more than $50k and they may have had more than 150 working on it at different times.

Another thing to account for is what they spent on bigger name voice actors like Patton Oswald, Matt Mercer, Corey Feldman, Peewee Herman, and fucking Billy West (the most expensive voice actor who doesn't own a show or do a Simpsons Voice). With so many voiced lines in the game this probably cost them another huge chunk of change (I'd guess around $1 millon per episode, or $8,000,000 but it could be more or less depending on who appeared in what episode - they still had Billy West narrate that shit though). It's even more baffling if you consider the target audience is children who probably don't watch much Futurama or give a shit about who the voice actors are.

This also excludes any more money spent for advertising the game either directly (TV or print ADS) or indirectly (via "Influencers" and "Game Journalists").

TL;DR - On the surface it seems successful - but it looks like that a lot of poor management (team size, development time, expensive voice actors, and an expensive licensed IP) took a big win and either made it a tiny win or a decent loss.
 
Tanner Glass said:
Patton Oswald, Matt Mercer, Corey Feldman, Peewee Herman, and fucking Billy West
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Were these even for pre-established roles that were keeping with the existing casting? Nothing against Billy West but if you're not making Futurama vs M&Ms or something there's no reason to hire him over any of a dozen other guys.
 
XYZpdq said:
Were these even for pre-established roles that were keeping with the existing casting? Nothing against Billy West but if you're not making Futurama vs M&Ms or something there's no reason to hire him over any of a dozen other guys.
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No, it was a new story with new characters. I don't play minecraft but I don't believe it's voiced by anyone (and if it was, it would be some 4channer that did it for free).

I personally like Billy West a lot but for a video game he's literally one of the most expensive people you could have hired for a Minecraft video game.

The only way you could literally get more expensive is to
A) Hire someone from the Simpsons
B) Hire a voice actor who owns the studio they act for (Matt and Trey from South Park, Matt G from Simpsons, Seth McFarlane from Family Guy)
 
Tanner Glass said:
I'm not sure if I buy that. It looks like it moved ~2 million units (let's say 2 million x $20 = $40,000,000) which was broken up by by however much they paid to license Minecraft (a property that microsoft valued at $2.5 billion) which is an unknown number but some estimates get up to $10,000,000 [25%].
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The numbers are actually much better:
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/games.php?name=Minecraft:+Story+Mode

The first season got 1.2M on XB360, 0.89M on PS3, 0.87M on PS4, 0.77M on XB1, 0.07M on WiiU and maybe a dozen copies on Vita. Total 3.8M on consoles only and excluding the two-season set sold for Switch.

There's also over 10M installs and 1M ratings on Android and who knows how many on iOS, but those platforms have first episode free and the rest are behind the optional paywall, so I can't tell how many people tapped "buy".

As for accurate PC sales, I have no idea, but I'd guess about 0.3M.

I think it's safe to assume the game sold about 4–5 million copies.
 
DieselBoogaloo said:
The numbers are actually much better:
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/games.php?name=Minecraft:+Story+Mode

The first season got 1.2M on XB360, 0.89M on PS3, 0.87M on PS4, 0.77M on XB1, 0.07M on WiiU and maybe a dozen copies on Vita. Total 3.8M on consoles only and excluding the two-season set sold for Switch.

There's also over 10M installs and 1M ratings on Android and who knows how many on iOS, but those platforms have first episode free and the rest are behind the optional paywall, so I can't tell how many people tapped "buy".

As for accurate PC sales, I have no idea, but I'd guess about 0.3M.

I think it's safe to assume the game sold about 4–5 million copies.
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That's including both seasons though, if you're including season two you'd have to potentially re-license the IP and add at least a full year (or more) of dev time and rehire all of the same expensive voice actors. Those numbers also don't include whenever the game went on sale.

Even if it was profitable (and it sounds like it might have been) - it was a tremendously low return on investment which is the opposite of how to make money.

Edit - Nevermind, looks like you were talking about S1 only.
 
They better fucking deliver.

People paid for the entire season and they should get the entire season.

On the other hand, the episodic model sucks. First of all, it encourages season passes, which are glorified preorders, so it's dumb to buy the game before all episodes come out and many people wisely didn't. Second, transitions between episodes restrict the plot development, so it can't branch out freely and is constrained to a narrow line. If there was a major decision in episode 1, then it would mean you need to make double of all the other episodes so that you can follow both branches without telling the player "lol, I know it's episode 3 out of 5 and you waited for it five months, but you made a bad decision in episode 1, so it's game over, you can only restart now". So that's why Telltale games couldn't have major decisions until their final episodes.

If you release the whole game at once, then you are free to design the narrative as you find fit, you won't have fans fuming "where's the next episode??!1", and no one forget about your game after seeing episode one in stores and deciding that they'll wait for the remaining episodes.
 
Tanner Glass said:
Not really. That's really another problem with those games if you think about it. Once you know how one of them works (what few decisions are branching or not) you've figured out all of them. Because of the design they're all actually very linear in nature.

Wolf Among Us had a few parts where you'd have to make a choice but it never really mattered all that much. It was a fun setting though.
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Part of the problem with TWAU is that it was meant to be a canon prequel to the Fables comics, so the writers were more limited with what they could do. Bigby, Snow, and several other characters couldn't be killed off, Mr Toad had to go to the farm, Ichabod had to leave fabletown etc.

Having said that, there were still plenty of characters and choices that they could have done something with but didn't, so I can't give them a pass on this one.
 
Should I be glad or not that they TT got their hands on the Full Throttle series cause the voice actor died all those years ago?
 
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