
Telltale Autopsy - smacktoward
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=44111
======
bliblah
I followed Telltales quite a bit before they went out of business, I even know
a few people that worked/applied to work there.

For me there were always red flags, they tried too hard to chase the dragon
after the unexpected success of TWD, all of the sudden they were churning out
2-3 titles a year (17 individual episodes were released in 2017 alone) with an
aging engine. They were constantly missing out release dates for episodes and
unable to update their games for new experiences.

Also do not forget that licences for these properties are very expensive to
procure making it even more difficult to break even.

They also added an Exec from Zynga as their CEO in 2017, which for me
represent the very worst gaming has to offer in terms of low effort,
exploitable gaming.

This was the final nail in the coffin, unsustainable business practices with
high level execs who only care about the bottom line always breeds failure.

Its a shame, a lot of people knew the end was coming but management kept quiet
until they literally had to close up shop and gave people a few hours to leave
the building. All the workers there deserve better.

~~~
felipemnoa
>>they tried too hard to chase the dragon

What does this phrase mean? A google search game me results about heroin use
which I don't think that that's what you meant.

~~~
Topgamer7
It's analogous to the heroin reference. Basically as a company they were
chasing that high from TWD's success in an unsustainable, detrimental manner.

------
faitswulff
"This Dumb Industry" is such a good name for this series of blog posts [0]. I
always tell people game development is both the hardest and least
(extrinsically) rewarding programming career you could pick: volatile, driven
by personalities, low paying, with hard engineering problems.

[0]:
[https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+ind...](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+industry)

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Working on video games is a lot like being in a band after High School.

You shouldn't do it with an expectation of any great rewards. You should
really only do it if you are so passionate about the field that you don't have
a choice.

Because of the high number of passionate people in the field the risk/reward
ratio will always be skewed against you and most people will not be properly
compensated for their work.

~~~
YinglingLight
From personal experience I'd say services like Patreon/Kickstarter has made it
easier to scratch a living as a Creative than ever before. There's 7.4 billion
people on the planet. Make a fraction of 0.000001% enamored with your Creative
product (be it yourself as an entertainer, your book series, your erotic app
game, whatever), and you can hold your own.

~~~
chokma
Sounds like the "1000 true fans" concept -
[https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-
fans/](https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/) \- i.e., you "just" need a
1000 people who are willing to pay a net 100$ / year for what you create.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
From a marketers perspective... that's not as easy as it looks.

To get 1,000 True Fans to commit we probably need to expose the product to
50,000 "True Fans". Hoping for a 2% conversion rate.

To reach 50,000 True Fans we will probably have to create awareness with a
larger group of potential True Fans that have a strong connection to your
Fandom, maybe 500,000.

To reach 1/2 a million people you are going to have to get well beyond a few
posts to your niche subeditors or making the front page on Hacker News.

If you come up with some great advertisements and eventually starting landing
your $100 per year True Fans, it might end up costing you $20 each to find
them. Not a huge problem... assuming you can do it. It's tough because in
addition to coding your own app you now had to learn how to be a pretty decent
user of AdSense or Facebook Ads. That is very possible, but it does eat into
the time you have to work on your core business.

And now you need another 200 fans to pay for the ads you have been buying.

~~~
seventhtiger
If you double your conversion rate, you halve the needed audience size. If you
target a niche with a competent product, you will not need massive reach to
the general audience. Gaming is a rich medium with many underserved
communities that would love to pay for what they like.

------
phendrenad2
(Sort of a tangent, but it is called out in the article...) Why DO companies
insist on starting out in the bay area? Is it really that hard to find talent
in second-string tech hubs?

~~~
Eric_WVGG
The answer I keep hearing is that it keeps the founders near the VC money,
which doesn't make sense here as I don't believe Telltale was pursuing that.

I've always wondered how much cash Double Fine burns through to stay in SF.

~~~
chaosite
Telltale was VC funded.
[https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/53723-08](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/53723-08)

------
derefr
> trends like online shooters, Battle Royale games, loot boxes, or any of the
> other fads that have pulled teams off course with the false promise of easy
> money

Citation? Because I always thought that game studios switched to these because
they _were_ “easy money”, not because they were fads. Critics and journalists
disliking a thing is different than it not being a successful strategy.

~~~
GW150914
In the Battle Royals space the place is littered with the corpses of devs and
publishers who kept on the fad. PUBG got there first, and then FortNite
leapfrogged them, and to be blunt all of other attempts are names with little
or no recognition. Remember The Culling II? Yeah, neither do I. And I don’t
remember the dozens of other games that have tried to copy the formula and
never even got the trivial recognition of something like Radical Heights,
which killed its publisher Boss Key.

Fade in games go something like this: a workable formula makes someone a lot
of money. They rise and at a certain thresholds major publishers take note and
iterate, crushing the original. Then other publishers inject said mechanics
into their flagship games until people are so sick of them that they can’t
stand it. There is a reason why all of the big upcoming shooters like CoD IV
have battle royale modes.

To a lesser extent fads can burn out without studios ever really getting into
it because it’s too small (relatively speaking of course). Surgeon Simulator
set of _years_ of “simulator” games ranging from I Am Bread to Black Screen
Simulator. Eventually we got Shower With Your Dad Simulator which subverted
the genre a bit, and set of another explosion of imitation. These indie fads
tend to follow that pattern of initial massive explosion followed by secondary
ignition when some slight twist on the formula introduces some air to the.
mixture, and this repeats with smaller explosions until the last dregs of fuel
are exhausted.

Zombie modes are another example, as are hero shooters like OverWatch (the
“big thing” before BR). Remember LawBreakers? Exactly.

[https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-
try...](https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-trying-and-
failing-compete/16712) What we’re seeing now with BR as it played out last
cycle.

------
forkLding
Although a lot of the commentary and criticism from people is the bad culture
but I really think this was a secondary problem, after all bad culture from
the top (autocratic behaviour plus harsh deadlines?) might not kill you.
(Apple, Tesla, etc.)

But it would seem the most important aspect is really the declining sales
every year that could likely be due to business decisions from the top or
simply a cash management issue where the cash at hand was not getting
replenished at hand fast enough which again could be a business decision gone
wrong based on overly positive sales expectations.

~~~
goostavos
Could a side issue be that the game format just wasn't sustainable? The sales
steadily declined after Walking Dead because it's just more of the same?

FWIW, I thought the first Walking Dead was super interesting. It reminded me
of those old Choose Your Adventure books. I had a blast playing it because it
_felt_ like there was weight behind the decisions. After beating it, I started
a fresh game so I could go through a totally different path / play style
and... the illusion shattered. The choices didn't have any notable effect on
the game.

And that was that. I just wasn't interested after the first game.

~~~
tetha
Yeah I feel the same. The Sam&Max titles by telltale are wild. There's weird
shit going on in these games, especially later on.

However, after the walking dead, the walking dead, wolf among us, minecraft
story mode... they kinda feels the same. And as you say, the games are not a
divergent graph like witcher 3 or the avenged is. It's more of a fork/join
graph, with very low distance from fork to join.

From there, I had no interest in their other games, tbh. I bought Minecraft
Story mode entirely because I like Petra, but that's about it.

------
madrox
I would summarize it more simply as a failure of business to manage their
money. Ed Catmull calls it "Feeding the Beast." They tried to turn interactive
narrative into a factory that cranked out new titles.

It's a shame. I haven't connected with stories in video games for a while. I
still long for the emotional depth of Mass Effect and TWAU. Telltale was one
of the good ones.

------
carapace
> Frankly, if I was an investor I’d refuse to give my money to any ninny who
> wanted to set up shop in any of the overcrowded, overpriced tech hubs.

I've wondered about this, VC's aren't stupid, what's the disconnect?

If I were starting a company in CA I'd go to Davis. (FWIW)

~~~
dilyevsky
Yes VCs aren’t stupid (well mostly) - they know you won’t be able to hire as
many similarly talented/experienced people in Atlanta. Want to hire some ex-
faang empoyee? Fogetaboutit.

And what’s in Davis? For all intents and purposes it’s just more expensive
Atlanta

~~~
carapace
> you won’t be able to hire as many similarly talented/experienced people

But we're talking about _starting_ a company. Typically you'll already have a
technical co-founder or someone, no? If you grow you can grow to SF. Has no VC
ever asked, "Would you be willing to relocate to <CHEAPER CITY> for two
years?"

> And what’s in Davis?

UC Davis.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davis)

> In 2006, Davis was ranked as the second most educated city (in terms of the
> percentage of residents with graduate degrees) in the US by CNN Money
> Magazine...

~[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California)

Have you been there? It's nice. :-) It's close to the Bay Area and has lower
costs and UC Davis. (And you don't have to put up with the _constant cold
winds!_ It's toasty there all year 'round!)

~~~
dilyevsky
What’s the point of starting in nowhere to relocate to sfba as soon as you
need to hire anyone?

Is UCD so much better than Georgia Tech? Some might disagree.

Not surprised it has most ppl with degrees - it’s probably mostly school staff
and some intel employees.

It’s not that close that you can actually drive to the bay in a reasonable
amount of time on a workday

~~~
carapace
> What’s the point of starting in nowhere to relocate to sfba as soon as you
> need to hire anyone?

Save millions of dollars?

> Is UCD so much better than Georgia Tech? Some might disagree.

But then you'd be in Georgia...

> Not surprised it has most ppl with degrees - it’s probably mostly school
> staff and some intel employees.

That's my point: it's a University town crawling with smart people.

> It’s not that close that you can actually drive to the bay in a reasonable
> amount of time on a workday

So what? It's not Outer Mongolia. You can visit the city easily. I'm not
suggesting a daily commute.

------
itsdrewmiller
How did telltale have 90 developers to lay off in 2017? Wasn't their bread and
butter a pretty simple quicktime event engine and their differentiator
storytelling?

------
Apocryphon
The video games industry is where we consistently hear some of the worst
stories of workers being mistreated and lied to under dysfunctional management
in toxic cultures. Constant crunch time for games that don't even succeed in
the market.

What would anti-union libertarians say about the labor conditions there?
Workers should just avoid the game industry until more tolerable and better-
paying workplaces arise? How is organizing workers not a valid solution to the
problems there? Do they think that unions will somehow make the situation
_worse_?

~~~
mrfredward
Collective bargaining relies on negotiating blanket policies for all the
workers. In some industries, that is fine. If all your brick layers get paid
the same and given the same breaks, and all your brick-laying supervisors get
their standard supervisor pay, that might be for the better.

It doesn't work that way for knowledge workers and creative types. Some people
are rare talents, some people are just okay. Some people fill wear 5 different
hats and cover responsibilities outside their title. One artist may be the
visionary behind your greatest success, another just follows orders, but both
are on the same team and at the same level of the hierarchy.

If you force a system where everyone makes the same salary based on how long
they've worked there, the best people will leave. But if people negotiate for
themselves, it isn't collective bargaining anymore, and you don't have a
union.

Want to prevent burnout? The union negotiates for rigid 9 to 5 hours. Many
creative people will hate it. Or you let people come in when the want, but
they have to fill out a timesheet, can't work overtime without the approval of
both a manager and a union rep, and have to adhere to rigid guidelines.

Unions can't work without bureaucracy, but creative people and creative
organizations don't work well with bureaucracy.

~~~
georgeecollins
>> It doesn't work that way for knowledge workers and creative types.

SAG WGA DGA

Last I checked all the best people in those fields were members.

~~~
WillPostForFood
The reason that Unions work for Hollywood is that the final product is
dependent on a small number of specific people (mainly actors, but also
writers and directors). If those people refuse to work, there is no product.
Because actors are unified and honor the other less powerful unions they imbue
them with power. Teamsters can strike and gain concessions from studios
because actors won't cross the picket line.

Knowledge workers are largely cogs. No game project can be held hostage by one
or a several critical employees. A majority of game jobs have already left
California, with drop in replacements in Shanghai or Montreal or Austin.

~~~
Apocryphon
Sounds like this article illustrates the vital importance in writers to
adventure games. Telltale Games’ post Walking Dead Season 1 efforts
specifically failed because the writing was not as strong and just attempted
to replicate the success of the first.

~~~
WillPostForFood
They are vitally important, but they aren't perceived by the public as vitally
important, so their negotiating power is limited.

