Telltale Games is Shutting Down (Updated)

Bad news, video game fans: Telltale Games, makers of highly-rated interactive stories like The Walking Dead, is shutting down.

“Telltale Games made the difficult decision to begin a major studio closure following a year marked by insurmountable challenges,” an announcement posted to Twitter explains. “A majority of the company’s employees were dismissed earlier [on Friday], with a small group of 25 employees staying on to fulfill the company’s obligations to its board and partners.”

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The firm says it will provide more information about the fate of its product portfolio “in the coming weeks.”

And that portfolio is pretty impressive: Telltale Games has released some of the best video games I’ve ever played, especially on mobile, including several based on The Walking Dead graphics novels, Minecraft: Story Mode, Batman, Game of Thrones, and many others. It was planning a game based on Stranger Things, the Netflix series.

Ah well. Hopefully, its games and game engines will end up in good hands.

Update: Telltale has now pulled The Walking Dead: Final Season, which was in-progress, from sale.

 

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Conversation 13 comments

  • jrickel96

    22 September, 2018 - 5:48 pm

    <p>Telltale is privately owned, so they may not end up being shut down but acquired. Could be an interesting acquisition for Microsoft if they choose to step in. Not sure they would. Telltale has been mismanaged for a while. MS could fix that. The engine also has problems – and MS could probably fix the problems or build a new engine to make development easier. </p><p><br></p><p>Be interesting to see what happens.</p>

  • darkphoenix99

    Premium Member
    22 September, 2018 - 6:01 pm

    <p>It's sad, but not a surprise. Even though they received public awareness over their recent titles, I felt they lost their heart and soul with all the latest licenced titles and the quicktime event laden 'adventure games' were a disappointment. Thank goodness I got the physical copies of Sam&amp;Max, Monkey Island, Wallace &amp; Gromit etc as they were the glory days of Telltale for me. Here's hoping the former employees set up a new studio to make proper adventure games, which is ironically how Telltale started, with former Lucas guys.</p>

    • bennett_cg

      24 September, 2018 - 1:44 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#326799">In reply to darkphoenix99:</a></em></blockquote><p>The engineers that delivered the first Walking Dead (and, I believe, The Wolf Among Us) have already moved on to other studios and have released games with those units. Particularly noteworthy is the game "Oxenfree" – well worth checking out.</p>

  • Ed

    Premium Member
    22 September, 2018 - 7:49 pm

    <p>Indeed, my son and I certainly enjoyed the walking dead series. </p>

  • kjb434

    Premium Member
    22 September, 2018 - 8:39 pm

    <p>There biggest sellers and only games to make a profit was the Minecraft Story mode games. The first Walking Dead series made a little profit. All other series were low sellers.</p><p><br></p><p>In a conversation on Reddit, it was discussed how more people watched many of the series on YouTube or Twitch. These games received lots of press and high views, but few people played them.</p><p><br></p><p>The games were so well made you could watch them like movies.</p><p><br></p>

  • MattHewitt

    Premium Member
    22 September, 2018 - 8:54 pm

    <p>Could Microsoft buy this thing? It seems like they would be good exclusives, with good IP. Just toss it into part of the game pass. </p>

  • IanYates82

    Premium Member
    22 September, 2018 - 10:35 pm

    <p>Sad news indeed. MY kids and I have been waiting for the next walking dead release coming this week. Apparently it's still coming but nothing really known or promised after that. Shame I've already bought the season pass but that's nothing compared to the poor folks who aren't even getting severance pay.</p><p><br></p><p>We played the Back to the Future game, all five episodes, last week. Even though it is old by today's standards, it had us hooked.</p><p><br></p><p>Only games I'm yet to play / finish are The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands. I'm told both are quite good.</p><p><br></p><p>With the Minecraft tie in I could see Microsoft getting good press and great IP jumping in to snap things up. Suspect it's too late for that and probably not worth the $$</p>

  • webdev511

    Premium Member
    23 September, 2018 - 12:50 pm

    <p>Well it wasn't because they didn't make very good well selling games. Sounds like higher ups spent more money than they should have on acquiring properties or something else….</p>

  • Scott Ross

    23 September, 2018 - 2:15 pm

    <p>It's a shame, the games were really good at story telling, and I did have an old colleague that worked for them. I hope the staff land on their feet and continue doing some really good story based games </p>

  • justme

    Premium Member
    24 September, 2018 - 7:03 am

    <p>That is a shame – though I do wonder if they wont get acquired by someone. Tales from the Borderlands was fantastic. I do hope someone picks up the IP. </p>

  • wbhite

    Premium Member
    24 September, 2018 - 8:41 am

    <p>I liked the games for the most part, but when I first played them, I was disappointed to learn that the endings were the same no matter the choices you made during the game play. I was hoping for some "choose your own adventure" type of play. Ah, well.</p>

  • gregsedwards

    Premium Member
    24 September, 2018 - 1:34 pm

    <p>So then, Tell Tale game studio is doing what the actual Walking Dead franchise should have done a couple of seasons ago… ?</p>

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