Telltale Games is Shutting Down

Telltale games was founded in 2014 by Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander, who were all previously a part of LucasArts. Their games did not receive much attention in the earlier years. They rose to fame with the episodic adventure series “The Walking Dead” which is based around the TV series of the same name. This made their style of narrative games really popular in the gaming community. After the success with The Walking Dead, they made a lot of other successful games like “The Wolf Among Us”, “Batman: The Enemy Within” and “Game of Thrones”.

Sadly, the company had to go through a lot of challenges in the recent years. The problems began in 2014 when many of the staff members claimed that decisions set by management resulted in the development team being kept in a perpetual state of “crunch time”.  This limited the amount of time that the creators and developers could spend on content in order to maintain a consistent flow of episodes to consumers but which impacted the quality of games.

On March 15^th 2017, Bruner announced that he had stepped down as CEO of Telltale. Apparently, he was voted out of this position by the Board of directors. The former Vice President for the game developer Zynga was announced as the new CEO. One year after being discharged as the CEO, Bruner sued the company seeking recovery of financial damages. Telltale claimed that this was just Bruner’s way to exact revenge on a company which was already under financial strain.

Major Studio Closure

Being unable to cope through the pressure of the many insurmountable problems the company was facing, Telltale laid off almost 250 of their employees without severance. They described it as a “major studio closure” and announced that just 25 employees are left, only to fulfill the company’s obligations to its boards and partners.

pic.twitter.com/evqg5X98WZ

— Telltale Games (@telltalegames) September 21, 2018

This is disheartening for many of the fans as they will not be able to play the second season of The Wolf Among Us and a game based around Stranger Things that was announced by the company earlier this year.