41–50 of 202 posts
I don't get how there is not a general insurance system for people losing their jobs unexpectedly which pays out three months of similar or something similar.
In Europe its called "Social Security"
Is it just that games companies suffering the same fate get more coverage in the media, or is it something about game studios that seem to make them more likely to crash and burn like this?
I know that games are quite consumer's-whim-driven and you're never really sure if you've got a hit on your hands or not until you release. I guess it is the same for movies, yet I've never heard of any movies spectacuarly just going bust half-way through filming and just abandonning what they are doing and packing it in (although I have heard of some near-misses). Yet it seems to happen a lot for games comapanies?
What gives?
P.S. sucks for the people working on this. Hope you all find something new!
I feel sorry for the employees and apologize in advance if what I'm going to say sounds too negative or blunt, but anyway here is one opinion. Telltale games wasn't a very innovative company. It shouldn't surprise anyone when a company goes bankrupt that primarily produces bad game adoptions of blockbuster movies as a franchise. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm only a gamer and not an industry expert, but it seems to me…
At least their "Wolf among us" was an extremely enjoyable adaptation of an existing comic book franchise with a novel story.
Sometimes you simply got to let the data speak for themselves: https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX It's so strange how the prestige around the brand was not correlated to the sells numbers. It so strange how their demise was so unexpected by the press and gaming communities when the writing was on the wall long ago.
Important to keep in mind here that all sales numbers for digital titles are, by necessity, estimates because major marketplaces like Steam not only don't release numbers but place limits on what kind of information developers can release. Previous services for estimating sales numbers were shut down by Valve. SteamSpy was at least fairly accurate up until it was shut down, but it also leaves out sales on consoles an…
I feel sorry for the employees and apologize in advance if what I'm going to say sounds too negative or blunt, but anyway here is one opinion. Telltale games wasn't a very innovative company. It shouldn't surprise anyone when a company goes bankrupt that primarily produces bad game adoptions of blockbuster movies as a franchise. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm only a gamer and not an industry expert, but it seems to me…
I feel sorry for people who lost their jobs but at the end of the day the people who have the creative vision for: Walking Dead, Back to The Future, Jurassic Park, Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, Batman and Guardians of The Galaxy do not sit within the 4 walls of Telltale.
If there is not someone with creative vision and ownership of your product within your company then the people calling the shots are sales and partnerships. Actual product always comes second to closing these deals and riding brands of others.
You can see this in their product lineup, when things went sour they didn't change the product, they just diversified the brands.
"years of nonstop crunch culture, toxic management, and frustration from developers who believed the company’s refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation" I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
> I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
It makes me wonder, given that there's probably fewer workers in games, who is making the lionshare of the money? Is it just a tiny sliver of investors? How did it get that way? One would think that talent could just walk away from toxic workplaces and be paid handsomely elsewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently making the same game over and over (with different intellectual property to tie it up) does not pay off.
Can someone explain more about "making the same game over and over"? I don't know anything about these games. Were they all similar, despite being different franchises?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's similar to how (in general) an industry-wide theme is that episodic titles have significant sales drop-off in later episodes. Sequels do too, albeit less so and less consistently. This is part of why companies selling episodic games (telltale included) try to sell you a whole season up front. A big notable example is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13 trilogy (3 games, FF13, FF13-2, and Lightning Returns), where IIR…
I can't help but think there's some truth to all the talk about people growing tired of the same mechanics being used in essentially every Telltale game after the first series of The Walking Dead. Going from personal experience, it was a hell of a ride the first outing but it grew pretty samey even when new settings and stories were applied to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The employees had to have known they were contractors though.... at least in my expense that is no mystery.
Well then you have to choose between turning down the job for the chance you'll need unemployment insurance or taking the job because you need a job. The rational choice is to take the job regardless.
The game industry seems pretty terrible to their workers.
Either way the employees had to know.