Many Telltale staff members have been terminated, some sources claiming it was a majority but that doesn’t seem true. Production on every planned game has continued, so fewer people are working on games that haven’t gotten moved forward. This normally means that a crunch is coming for any remaining members of the staff.
TellTale losing its workforce doesn’t bode well for the next games in production. The company sent a statement to Geoff Keighley that ended with, “all projects currently in development are still in production, and we have no further updates at this time.” This confirms that a lesser staff for the same amount of work, which does not sound good. Apparently, the company also confirmed that The Wolf Among Us 2, their flagship game, is currently in production.
Without any reports of a pizza party to up morale, we’re thinking that this is going down a similar route as last time. Telltale having too many projects at once and needing to lay off staff while working on those projects is what happened when the studio originally closed. Last time, TellTale paid a lot of money to acquire development rights on multiple franchises and didn’t change the formula from the first Walking Dead.
This strategy led to the games feeling stale, especially when it became clear that decisions didn’t really affect where the story went. The first episode of The Expanse was recently released, and while sales figures aren’t available, layoffs following a release are concerning. The game may not be doing well enough to keep people employed, which may have been a huge hope for this series. Obviously, studios want every game to do well, but The Expanse is the first new series that Telltale has released since reopening.
We’ll have to see where things go, but this is definitely feeling like Deja Vu. Hopefully, the company can bring themselves to the point where they don’t need to keep laying off staff.
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