Throughout today many were left shocked that the California-based studio was on its way to complete closure, with updates of reassurance that gave hope for the 14 year old developer. Known from its on-going series of episodic titles like The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, today Telltale has relieved 225 employees working on planned projects set to release within the next year.
A list of employees for the studio took it to social media regarding their release from Telltale as they are in search for new work. A handful of them have stated publicly and discreetly that the studio is having its worse laying off staff as of yet and even implying ultimate shutdown for the developer.
This isn’t the first time Telltale has faced this problem as nearly a quarter of their staff was laid off back in November. The company stated to focus more on refining their titles in result from the company’s restructuring.
Following the sudden news, it was revealed that upcoming titles including The Wolf Among Us Season 2, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones Season 2 have been cancelled with no chance of making it to release indefinitely. Originally mentioned that a skeleton crew of the remaining employees were set to work on finishing the Final Season of The Walking Dead, but later on it was revealed the group is tasked to wrap up on the deal with Netflix for the Minecraft Story Mode, USGamer heard from their sources.
— Telltale Games (@telltalegames) September 21, 2018
For the remainder of The Walking Dead The Final Season, Telltale is still scheduled to release Episode Two ‘Suffering the Children’ next week on September 25th. For the episodes following, the season will be left unfinished as telltale files for bankruptcy. Which raises the question for fans who own the season pass for the game.
The unfortunate news have left many feel the current event feel as unreal when trying to process what happened today. Many studios took it to social media in regards to Telltale closing and offering those affected positions at their offices. Developers such as Santa Monica Studio and Ninja Theory are examples of studios reaching out to those who were suddenly left without a job.
Saddening to see a studio with an growing list of milestones to go so soon. With Telltale just perfecting their Telltale Tool engine for The Walking Dead’s concluding season, it was a shame the seeing the developer adopt Unity for the now cancelled titles. Now that there’s nothing left for the future of the studio, many are left to wonder what is in-store for episodic titles as a whole with Telltale as an example.
Studio CEO Peter Hawley in his statement blamed sales of their games being the answer to this. For if this is true for all games in the episodic genre as a whole is true, we might see the same for Life is Strange possibly in the near future. With the first episode of Life is Strange 2 coming two days after Walking Dead’s final episode (September 27), this might foreshadow the future for the episodic series also. On top of the debut of the second game, The Adventures of Captain Spirit was said to be expanded on with more episodes coming to the free title.
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