Telltale Games shuts down majority of studio

Most future releases cancelled, including completing the final season of The Walking Dead.

Telltale Games announced yesterday, Friday the 21st of September, is closing it’s studio, and cancelling planned future releases. This news follows last year’s laying off of 90 employee’s by the studio, reportedly following mismanagement and a heavy crunch culture.

Telltale Games enjoyed success with several releases and an estimated 17 million total copies of games owned by players. However, the majority of this comes from the studio’s earlier releases, such as The Walking Dead Season 1 & 2 (2013), The Wolf Among Us (2013) and Poker Night At The Inventory (2010) all having at least a million owners on Steam. However, the figures are vastly lower for future releases, with the best performing recent release, Batman: The Enemy within (2017) having between 200,000-500,000 thousand owners, while Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two achieved between 50,000-100,000.

Pete Hawley, the CEO of Telltale games said in a statement:

“It’s been an incredibly difficult year for Telltale as we worked to set the company on a new course. Unfortunately, we ran out of time trying to get there. We released some of our best content this year and received a tremendous amount of positive feedback, but ultimately, that did not translate to sales. With a heavy heart, we watch our friends leave today to spread our brand of storytelling across the games industry.”

A small number of staff have been kept on to continue the Minecraft Story Mode project for Netflix, but the final season of The Walking Dead will not be completed, and other future releases, including The Wolf Among Us 2 and Stranger Things have been cancelled.