>make Walking Dead to chase a trend >it is VERY successful >start buying up a bunch of expensive licences >Batman, Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Fables, Minecraft >none of these make a profit >all of these expensive licences completely destroy all finances >bankrupt >get bought out >start making games again >immediately buy the licence for the Expanse, very expensive >doesn't make a profit >bankrupt soon
I don't know how it goes after that. I thought that Skybound bought them just to put out the rest of the TWD games they had planned. I don't know if the expanse game was part of Skybound's plan.
Also let's not forget the Jurassic Park, Star Trek, Back to the Future, and Guardians of the Galaxy games. They were just pounding them out.
Jurassic Park was actually one of their early games, before Walking Dead. A lot of its mechanics were in its infancy, like there were rankings for how well you did quick time events that don't appear in any later title. As such, I wouldn't count that.
That people barely remember those games shows that the licences weren't worth it. I think people fondly talk about WD, Batman or the Borderlands game, which are probably all cheaper licences than Marvel or Disney stuff.
Lol, not even.
The company got destroyed by being successful, paradoxically.
99% of what make their games feel good is because they give the illusion that your choices matters.
Except once the company and its game become famous, people quickly realized that everyone was getting the same shit no matter your choice.
Walking Dead basically fricked up their one single trick by being too mainstream.
Once the illusion was removed, you are only left with a mediocre point click.
Them stretching their resources too thin and making terrible investments was just the cherry on top.
While people remind me my version isn't the truth, it's what I remember.
Team was allowed to make their own version of the popular comic/TV Show The Walking Dead. Head writer made an award winning first season. Then the CEO used this new fame and money to acquire licenses for multiple games. Meanwhile the writer behind Season One wanted more money and a higher position in the company. The CEO laughed at him, so the writer quit, leaving them with literally nobody to helm the stories. It was all downhill after that, while the CEO licensed more and more games. Eventually, too many quotas were missed and by contract, they HAD to have completed games within the year, so they poached talent from other companies and gave them insanely good contracts...only they did this a thousand times over. They were signing more contracts than scripts and eventually went bankrupt.
No fricking clue what happened with the lawsuits, but Skybound acquired The Walking Dead and a couple other IPs. Then somehow a third-party got involved and Telltale Games came back into being...then fricking nothing, after several announcements.
it's funny because you'd think it would be super easy for them to churn out episode after episode but apparently the engine was so fricking dogshit that they had insane crunch periods, basically on every release, for their literal google play store tier Episode-slop stories
So the engine was awful in terms of quality AND horribly inefficient to work with, and they never invested a cent into using a better one?
They deserved to fail.
They made one game that was a superhit so they went nuts trying to make that same level of success again using the same formula. So they put on tons of licensed projects and hired tons of new staff to just churn out these games that were basically Choices Matter+Low Puzzles+Licensed IP. Further, they hired tons of "blue hairs" who if anything else are painful to fire and absolutely a major draw on funds.
And it turns out adventure games are not super profitable.
Walking Dead, Borderlands, and Wolf Among Us gave them delusions of grandeur.
All I know is if Wolf Among Us 2 is full of millenial writing, they're going back under again.
Okay, it's basically a visual novel with quick time events. Ganker is quick to complain it's not really a 'game', but some of the stories are interesting and should be played not just watched.
What I recommend is you get Wolf Among Us when it is on sale, it's 15 bucks right now, because it's pretty good - and if you like the mechanics go for the Expanse.
Didn't Telltale recently put out a space game that ended up flopping? And wasn't it pozzed? Because if it was, I pray that layoffs come for them again.
>company called telltale games >make """games""" where interactivity and input is reduced to choosing dialogue options >refuse to innovate a formula that worked once
curious. glad to see this shit fad has come to pass, their ""games"" were shit
I'm with you anon, but even by non-action game standards Telltale's output barely qualifies as "games". The only interactivity is decision-making and dialogue selections and none of that makes any difference at all. They're movies that look terrible, are extremely low budget, janky and unambitious, are badly written and predictably formulaic, and condescend to the viewer by pretending to be interactive when they're not.
>Tales from the Borderlands ends up being the most liked Borderlands game >Randy makes a sequel to it WITHOUT ANY of the devs who made the first >New Tales from the Borderlands has even worse writing than Borderlands 3 >They completely skipped out on making DLC for Wonderlands despite that game making money because they thought New Tales would be more successful >It's a catastrophic bomb >Randy doesn't give a single frick as it's gonna be in Borderlands 4 and that game will likely be even worse than New Tales
I pray that Borderlands movie flopping forces 2K to clean house at GearBox and finally get rid of Randy.
They got lucky and made a game that people liked. Then they mistakenly assumed that everything in that game was a recipe for succes. Every telltale game has 4 dialogue options with one of them being silence. Every telltale game has 5 major A or B decisions each episode. No attempts where made to figure out how to make things better, just the same shit churned out over and over again. The Until Dawn creators with their dark anthology series are doing the same thing.
>The Until Dawn creators with their dark anthology series are doing the same thing.
In all honest I love those games and hope they don't stop. While they are very formulaic from one another in the grand scheme of things nobody else makes games like this.
The only thing that sucks about the Dark Pictures anthology is 80% of the time it's just a "there were no monsters" twist.
Thank God for House of Ashes. What a wonderful horror concept.
They're going to suffer the same way as telltale because they follow arbitrary restrictions. Why do we need to see those relationship bars / traits in all the games when they don't do anything? Why are there always 5 characters we control? Why is the curator always there? Why do we always only have 2 choices or say nothing? They just randomly decided they wanted to make 8 games like this before the first game was even out, so now we have to wait for another 4 of them to release before they can improve the formula. It's really limiting because none of it necessarily improves the game and only restricts how good it could be. Hope they survive long enough to change it up but I doubt it.
>The Until Dawn creators with their dark anthology series are doing the same thing.
The difference being they give you more choice (still not a whole lot) and actually try to be pleasing to look at.
The higher ups saw what a big success the first Walking Dead game was and thought "Well since the fans liked it, let's make a bunch of games that are similar. They will of course buy that too." But the fans didn't. The gameplay was the same. No innovation. People learned more and more that choices didn't matter and you could "play" the games on Youtube.
The company stretched itself thin with multiple projects. They hired a lot of new people, including workers who got full salary for basically doing nothing. All this combined steadily drained the company's economy. It went on for a long time, but the higher ups were too stupid to see or fix it. Eventually they had to fire 100 people, but that only delayed things because the damage was already too severe. Some months later, all workers were told they had 30 minutes to take their belongings and leave the building.
>Make games where your choices matter >Lol, not really >Actually make visual novels with occasional qtes, 'puzzles', and illusions of choice >Shovel out so many that you oversaturate the market >Die
David Cage games at least have production value and multiple endings.
They kept chasing for the success Walking Dead made them but they kept using the same tired formula of choices not mattering and graphics that looked like wooden puppets with jerky movements.
The games just ended up all being the same shit of one big plot twist and stories that didn't always make sense.
The Walking Dead 1 was a really well-executed magic trick. All the little UI messages and character reactions went a long way towards making you feel like your choices really mattered. It may not have mattered at all who you gave food to at the start of episode 2, but it still tricked you into thinking hard about it anyway. A lot of effort went into the ruse- Carly and Doug became your closest confidant and actually stuck around for a few episodes before the branches were trimmed. And the characters were well-written enough that you came to care about them.
But magic tricks are only impressive before you know the trick, and every game they put out after that tried using the same misdirections. It just wasn't believable or impressive anymore. Furthermore, Telltale got really lazy about hiding their strings and trap doors in general. Now if a character could live or die depending on your choices, they would just fade into the background, get maybe one or two lines of generic dialog, and then die by the end of the episode anyway. Nobody believed in the magic anymore.
the episodic nature of the game meant anyone with half a brain wont play at launch or watch a streamer like most did at the time (pewdiepie highest viewed video is season 1 ending)
In my head I imagine the developers were primarily male, and then because of how narrative games appeal to a female audience, they let female developers into the company and the quality massively reduced to the point where they had to bankrupt the company.
all of their games cost the same as Quantic and Supermassive for a fraction of the content and interactivity.
They can't fricking make a good game nor story
too much telling, not enough gaming
>make Walking Dead to chase a trend
>it is VERY successful
>start buying up a bunch of expensive licences
>Batman, Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Fables, Minecraft
>none of these make a profit
>all of these expensive licences completely destroy all finances
>bankrupt
>get bought out
>start making games again
>immediately buy the licence for the Expanse, very expensive
>doesn't make a profit
>bankrupt soon
The Wolf Among Us 2 is just cursed. Cancelled twice now kek.
What sucks is I just want Poker Night 3. They should stick to that.
Basically what said, they overreached and their finances couldn't handle it when the games didn't sell.
>Bought out
I don't know how it goes after that. I thought that Skybound bought them just to put out the rest of the TWD games they had planned. I don't know if the expanse game was part of Skybound's plan.
Also let's not forget the Jurassic Park, Star Trek, Back to the Future, and Guardians of the Galaxy games. They were just pounding them out.
Jurassic Park was actually one of their early games, before Walking Dead. A lot of its mechanics were in its infancy, like there were rankings for how well you did quick time events that don't appear in any later title. As such, I wouldn't count that.
That people barely remember those games shows that the licences weren't worth it. I think people fondly talk about WD, Batman or the Borderlands game, which are probably all cheaper licences than Marvel or Disney stuff.
Back to the Future was good.
I just remember that guy did a spot on Michael J Fox impression
Lol, not even.
The company got destroyed by being successful, paradoxically.
99% of what make their games feel good is because they give the illusion that your choices matters.
Except once the company and its game become famous, people quickly realized that everyone was getting the same shit no matter your choice.
Walking Dead basically fricked up their one single trick by being too mainstream.
Once the illusion was removed, you are only left with a mediocre point click.
Them stretching their resources too thin and making terrible investments was just the cherry on top.
While people remind me my version isn't the truth, it's what I remember.
Team was allowed to make their own version of the popular comic/TV Show The Walking Dead. Head writer made an award winning first season. Then the CEO used this new fame and money to acquire licenses for multiple games. Meanwhile the writer behind Season One wanted more money and a higher position in the company. The CEO laughed at him, so the writer quit, leaving them with literally nobody to helm the stories. It was all downhill after that, while the CEO licensed more and more games. Eventually, too many quotas were missed and by contract, they HAD to have completed games within the year, so they poached talent from other companies and gave them insanely good contracts...only they did this a thousand times over. They were signing more contracts than scripts and eventually went bankrupt.
No fricking clue what happened with the lawsuits, but Skybound acquired The Walking Dead and a couple other IPs. Then somehow a third-party got involved and Telltale Games came back into being...then fricking nothing, after several announcements.
Apparently the engine was dogshit, way too complicated to use for these simple products. The management was terrible and were on the worker's asses.
They made some games but working on them was miserable.
it's funny because you'd think it would be super easy for them to churn out episode after episode but apparently the engine was so fricking dogshit that they had insane crunch periods, basically on every release, for their literal google play store tier Episode-slop stories
So the engine was awful in terms of quality AND horribly inefficient to work with, and they never invested a cent into using a better one?
They deserved to fail.
they did that with Sam & Max, it became stale and they ended it. squeezed all the blood from the rock
They made one game that was a superhit so they went nuts trying to make that same level of success again using the same formula. So they put on tons of licensed projects and hired tons of new staff to just churn out these games that were basically Choices Matter+Low Puzzles+Licensed IP. Further, they hired tons of "blue hairs" who if anything else are painful to fire and absolutely a major draw on funds.
And it turns out adventure games are not super profitable.
Walking Dead, Borderlands, and Wolf Among Us gave them delusions of grandeur.
All I know is if Wolf Among Us 2 is full of millenial writing, they're going back under again.
One trick ponies.
>"Zoe will remember this."
>She dies 30 seconds after that.
People stopped being interested. Because there best games (Batman II and Tales from the Borderlands) were barely played.
I'm trying to figure out what was worse:
>Game of Thrones
>Minecraft
>Guardians of the Galaxy
It was Minecraft, without a doubt
>Season 2 gets made
>They start adding in Minecraft ecelebs as characters
And the zoomers ate that slop.
Game of Thrones is ok. I can respect it for expanding on the lore and adapting some book only elements like the Ghiscari legions.
Game of Thrones felt like you were just taking Ls all the fricking time
Is their expanse game any good?
It's a telltale game. Do you like Telltale games? If so, eh. If not, watch it on Youtube.
Financially? Game of Thrones.
In terms of quality? Minecraft, no question.
never played one
I like expanse tho that's why i m asking
Okay, it's basically a visual novel with quick time events. Ganker is quick to complain it's not really a 'game', but some of the stories are interesting and should be played not just watched.
What I recommend is you get Wolf Among Us when it is on sale, it's 15 bucks right now, because it's pretty good - and if you like the mechanics go for the Expanse.
thanks anon
yeah, Wolf Among Us was their best game, it's a shame 2 will never come out
Didn't Telltale recently put out a space game that ended up flopping? And wasn't it pozzed? Because if it was, I pray that layoffs come for them again.
>company called telltale games
>make """games""" where interactivity and input is reduced to choosing dialogue options
>refuse to innovate a formula that worked once
curious. glad to see this shit fad has come to pass, their ""games"" were shit
Not everyone like bling bling bang bang games.
Sometimes I people like playing "games" like that, as you put it.
I'm with you anon, but even by non-action game standards Telltale's output barely qualifies as "games". The only interactivity is decision-making and dialogue selections and none of that makes any difference at all. They're movies that look terrible, are extremely low budget, janky and unambitious, are badly written and predictably formulaic, and condescend to the viewer by pretending to be interactive when they're not.
Anon, I can only take so much “Dead” this “Darkest” that, “Evil” this and “Death” that. Sometimes games like these are nice. Frick off.
>watch """gameplay""" on youtube
>it's literally the same experience for free
if you liked those overpriced movies you need to stop existing
There are countless examples of games that are "games like these" but infinitely better
>moviegame shit
>but also shit on its own
Glass them
Overinvesting in new projects without having their revenue streams guaranteed. Complete decimation of the studio as a result.
>Tales from the Borderlands ends up being the most liked Borderlands game
>Randy makes a sequel to it WITHOUT ANY of the devs who made the first
>New Tales from the Borderlands has even worse writing than Borderlands 3
>They completely skipped out on making DLC for Wonderlands despite that game making money because they thought New Tales would be more successful
>It's a catastrophic bomb
>Randy doesn't give a single frick as it's gonna be in Borderlands 4 and that game will likely be even worse than New Tales
I pray that Borderlands movie flopping forces 2K to clean house at GearBox and finally get rid of Randy.
Randy and Gearbox are the wienerroaches of vidya.
They got lucky and made a game that people liked. Then they mistakenly assumed that everything in that game was a recipe for succes. Every telltale game has 4 dialogue options with one of them being silence. Every telltale game has 5 major A or B decisions each episode. No attempts where made to figure out how to make things better, just the same shit churned out over and over again. The Until Dawn creators with their dark anthology series are doing the same thing.
>The Until Dawn creators with their dark anthology series are doing the same thing.
In all honest I love those games and hope they don't stop. While they are very formulaic from one another in the grand scheme of things nobody else makes games like this.
The only thing that sucks about the Dark Pictures anthology is 80% of the time it's just a "there were no monsters" twist.
Thank God for House of Ashes. What a wonderful horror concept.
They're going to suffer the same way as telltale because they follow arbitrary restrictions. Why do we need to see those relationship bars / traits in all the games when they don't do anything? Why are there always 5 characters we control? Why is the curator always there? Why do we always only have 2 choices or say nothing? They just randomly decided they wanted to make 8 games like this before the first game was even out, so now we have to wait for another 4 of them to release before they can improve the formula. It's really limiting because none of it necessarily improves the game and only restricts how good it could be. Hope they survive long enough to change it up but I doubt it.
David Cage keeps winning
>The Until Dawn creators with their dark anthology series are doing the same thing.
The difference being they give you more choice (still not a whole lot) and actually try to be pleasing to look at.
The higher ups saw what a big success the first Walking Dead game was and thought "Well since the fans liked it, let's make a bunch of games that are similar. They will of course buy that too." But the fans didn't. The gameplay was the same. No innovation. People learned more and more that choices didn't matter and you could "play" the games on Youtube.
The company stretched itself thin with multiple projects. They hired a lot of new people, including workers who got full salary for basically doing nothing. All this combined steadily drained the company's economy. It went on for a long time, but the higher ups were too stupid to see or fix it. Eventually they had to fire 100 people, but that only delayed things because the damage was already too severe. Some months later, all workers were told they had 30 minutes to take their belongings and leave the building.
Here's a documentary where they talk to former employees. The company was really mismanaged by stupid bosses.
>Make games where your choices matter
>Lol, not really
>Actually make visual novels with occasional qtes, 'puzzles', and illusions of choice
>Shovel out so many that you oversaturate the market
>Die
David Cage games at least have production value and multiple endings.
At least visual novels tend to be better written and aren't held back by shit-tier "animations"
They kept chasing for the success Walking Dead made them but they kept using the same tired formula of choices not mattering and graphics that looked like wooden puppets with jerky movements.
The games just ended up all being the same shit of one big plot twist and stories that didn't always make sense.
The Walking Dead 1 was a really well-executed magic trick. All the little UI messages and character reactions went a long way towards making you feel like your choices really mattered. It may not have mattered at all who you gave food to at the start of episode 2, but it still tricked you into thinking hard about it anyway. A lot of effort went into the ruse- Carly and Doug became your closest confidant and actually stuck around for a few episodes before the branches were trimmed. And the characters were well-written enough that you came to care about them.
But magic tricks are only impressive before you know the trick, and every game they put out after that tried using the same misdirections. It just wasn't believable or impressive anymore. Furthermore, Telltale got really lazy about hiding their strings and trap doors in general. Now if a character could live or die depending on your choices, they would just fade into the background, get maybe one or two lines of generic dialog, and then die by the end of the episode anyway. Nobody believed in the magic anymore.
>Trust us guys, these people will be important to season 2 of Walking Dead
Frick you Telltale
I got very suspicious of that when I realized Bonnie always agrees come with the black woman at the end no matter what you choose.
they didn't make a wallace and gromit grand adventures season 2
I'm pretty sure there were two W&G telltale games.
Fraid not. There were other Wallace and Gromit games, but Telltale only did the one season.
They forgot to make games and focused on the telltale part, which they also failed at.
laziness, incompetence, arrogance
the episodic nature of the game meant anyone with half a brain wont play at launch or watch a streamer like most did at the time (pewdiepie highest viewed video is season 1 ending)
In my head I imagine the developers were primarily male, and then because of how narrative games appeal to a female audience, they let female developers into the company and the quality massively reduced to the point where they had to bankrupt the company.
Needed more little girls