Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
- They really did not see a full studio closure coming so suddenly. Yes, they were aware that they were struggling, but the 25% staff reduction was supposed to keep the studio sustainable.
- They were in the planning stages for an original IP, their new leadership realized too late that expensive IP licenses were unsustainable.
- Their frantic development pace meant that they their engine was a patchwork of features cobbled together over the years, and not enough resources to rework it, despite their audiences stating that they didn't care enough to fix it. This made development a lot more painful than it should have been. They finally ditched it for Unity, but again, much too late.
- They were getting ready to move into a new office building. That's how in the dark everyone at the company was kept.
- All of these actions were caused by incompetent management, their staff was and still is amazingly talented.
Unless you live in an absolutely hopeless job market (e.g. small mid-west towns with nothing for 50-60 miles around them), then relocating for a job should come with absolutely mind-blowing perks and really be worth it for you to uproot everything.
Or you're relocating within the same region where you can still commute back every weekend or so (e.g. DC to NY or Boston to NY).
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-d...
- Cutting a quarter of staff is a Hail Mary unless it's preceded and accompanied by a core strategy pivot, generally.
- Planning new and original IP is typical busy work for a studio that specializes in licensed games. Hiring is hard, expensive and slow; keeping the team busy is standard when looking for another license
- Self-evident much?
- Moving offices is a great way to save operation expenses when the lease is up, if you're desperate.
- Everyone blames management, but often it's the failure to find sufficient revenue is to blame _first_. Their games just weren't selling that well.
Even more cynically, planning a move helps defer costs in the existing space. Anything from new amenities to fixing broken desks can potentially be deflected with "it's not worth it right before we move".
Yeah, so this is just pure mismanagement. Either they couldn't do math, or they signed an agreement that required some sort of hidden balloon payment, or they couldn't reign in their costs when managers were allowed to buy things under the sun.
> Their frantic development pace meant that they their engine was a patchwork of features cobbled together over the years, and not enough resources to rework it, despite their audiences stating that they didn't care enough to fix it.
Again, mismanagement. Someone came up with a term that managers could understand: "Technical Debt". The "Debt" part is the "interest" you pay because you are prioritizing features over maintaining your tech stack. And no doubt would add to their frantic development pace.
Generously, bulk firings like that can be an attempt to add runway, or compensate (painfully) for over-expansion. Telltale management may have been hoping for a few more high-profile releases that would keep them solvent, and cut staff devoted to riskier or lower-margin work in hopes of surviving until those profits hit. When the numbers came in lower than hoped, there was nothing left in the hopper and no more point in delaying the collapse.
Of course, everything in Telltale's story screams mismanagement, and the overexpansion was pretty clearly an issue in the first place. A studio producing largely one-trick games around expensive branded properties can't spin up new projects freely for new staff, and even if they do they were competing with their own games to the point of market saturation.
Imagine having to reanimate gravity by hand due to the lack of a physics engine, now imagine that happening over a scene change that happened during a management review shortly before the project was supposed to ship.
I can't really think of any examples off hand.
TTG shtick was essentially “emotional abuse simulators” all their games had one trick get you attached to characters and see them die with very little actual player control over it.
They were one trick pony and the novelty wore off rather quickly.
Their games also were based on expensive franchises and they often offered the first chapter for free in order to hook people in.
They also never really developed their formula further the games didn’t became more interactive the same quick time events over and over that never really changed the overall story more than which one of these two will die and or betray you later.
I’m actually surprised that they lasted this long given how expensive it is to develop these games even if they weren’t technically impressive recording hours and hours of voice acting is much more expensive than shiny coding shaders.
Some of their games were like this, but others were not. The Tales from the Borderlands series and Guardians of the Galaxy series were primarily vehicles for comedy, and did not rely on the trope you're mentioning.
For the most part the games are "nearly as good". TTG burnt through a lot of great writers and craftsmen, and never quite replaced the folks that made the early work particularly great. They wanted to be a television studio, and a certain churn like that was inevitable, regardless of all the other mismanagement problems they had.
Batman was more about presenting the different "faces" of Batman and letting the player decide which fit best their playstyle/interest. The consequences of "is Batman the mask or is Bruce Wayne?" and "does Batman care about Bruce Wayne's friends/feelings?" There are some emotional highs, but nothing quite as "abusive" as The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones at their worst.
Minecraft Story Mode was their next most profitable after The Walking Dead, and just a silly joy/blast. Somewhat to par with Strongbad/Sam & Max. Recommended, even if you aren't a big Minecraft fan.
The Fables game (The Wolf Among Us) was a strong detective novel with fantasy elements. Playing to early work strengths when TTG was funding Sam & Max / Strongbad with CSI games.
Tales from the Borderlands was the closest to a Sam & Max in terms of humor of recent output. I burnt out on the grind of the Borderlands FPS games, but enjoyed a lot of the humor to them, and TTG knocked out of the some of what was missing in the storylines of the FPS games, and very much brought the humor. Even if the FPS games don't interest you, Tales from the Borderlands may be worth playing just because they are funny/charming/weird.
I haven't gotten very far in Guardians of the Galaxy, so I'm not sure how it stacks up.
GoT was essentially the same as TWD.
However the gameplay was essentially identical across all of them a semi interactive cut scene that is broken by QTEs which don’t have a major impact on the overall story arc they at best just shift a few characters around the events still unfold as they are.
Expensive licenses and a repetitive “point and click” gameplay with dwindling sales just doesnt work and I don’t think it was a surprise to the upper management or the board. And I’m actually surprised it came as a surprise to employees who should’ve been aware of poor sales and high costs.
You can try to guess based on sales and nr of employees, but it’s hardly an exact science.
IMO we give a lot of credit to these large companies and trust them to do right by us when they fire us/lay us off/we leave. I feel bad for all the people who worked at TTG that had no savings and no idea that this could happen. This certainly has the ability to make modern day slaves out of those that were blindsided by possible medical expenses, debt, and/or the struggle to find a new gig.
You are quick to blame the victims for being complacent, and at the same time you don't realize how important it is to know your company's financials when making employment decisions. Just because you can think of some strawman to burn, don't assume you're so much cleverer than everyone else.
Game of Thrones and the marvel and DC licensed games couldn’t have been cheap to license and they “upped” their game with getting bigger and bigger voice actors and for GoT they licensed the likeness of quite a few of the main cast of GoT so HBO and the actors had kept most of the revenue I presume.
Also as their biggest games weren’t something you would let children play i wonder how many parents assumed that shit I’m not letting my kid play this and the adults weren’t really interested in the franchise.
Most licensed games are a pretty big flop only the really good ones make it because they are a good game and not because of the license. Comic book and movie games have always had a horrible stigma with being poor games and in all honest the staleness of the TTG formula didn’t really help at that point.
Minecraft Story Mode was presumably their next best selling after The Walking Dead of recent output, presumably because it could appeal to a broader and younger audience.
Though that still isn't saying much looking at the Steam chart presented in the post. Though Minecraft Story Mode sales is also presumably under-reported in Steam numbers as you would expect more console owners among families with kids than PC players.
I for one never bought a Telltale game because I knew they'd wind up as either in part of a pretty solid bundle or even just a full fledged Telltale bundle. Can't think of another company in the games industry who so willingly devalued their whole catalogue as quickly. Assume the goal was to get loads of people up to date so they'd pay full price on launch for the next season of w/e but...
Everyone I know who enjoyed the first GoT Telltale game had quit by the third, but apparently there were six in total? That hardly looks like a sustainable technique.
I've been interviewed at companies where it was evident from my questions that I would make more working half time at my current employer than the hours typically worked at the prospective employer.
Really, I don't see why overtime is so rare in our industry. Not having it is more often an excuse to over utilize and under budget than to deal with extreme situations.
Besides, you're only as valuable to others as you allow yourself to be treated. An employer who is accustomed to exploiting you with ease doesn't have much impetus to improve the terms of your employment.
working long != working hard
It’s not a gaming industry thing, and no job segments are safe from this kind of thing. Just a reminder to insist on a clearly stated severance package when you join, and walk away if an employer won’t offer that to you, no matter what you think about your personal leverage in the situation or your seniority or anything else. When it comes to generous severance that is stated in the employment agreement, do not take no for an answer.
And Telltale was vastly more at risk than most studios because of their episodic games. They basically sold each game with a funnel, and one bad episode jeopardized sales for everything after it.
If some studio like Supergiant (or perhaps some more-prolific equivalent) released four years of bad-to-average games, I would still keep an eye on their output in hopes that any one new release might be great. But Telltale was putting out all of these big-license games and had everything past Episode 1 stymied by past weakness like a TV show with a bad opener. It was an almost uniquely vulnerable situation for a studio.
Sad for some of the employees I guess, but I think the company deserves this outcome.
Can't stand working with "do anything for the company" types. They are naive.
Above that, employee entitlements get paid out first in the event of bankruptcy/wind-up (i.e. before any investors or creditors see a cent).
Also, any director of a company that doesn't comply (i.e. keep enough cash on hand) is likely to 1) get banned from being a director of a company, 2) prosecuted, and worst of all 3) get reamed by the tax-office for the amount owing.
Healthcare is almost entirely public here. Employer-provided private health insurance is rare.
won't happen in the states.
Even when well executed, the formula is hard to keep fresh, and the emphasis on story and writing leads to generally poor replayability. Particularly now, in the youtube/twitch age - most of the enjoyment of these kinds of games is watching the story play out, rather than actually playing the game.
First, Infocom was arguably supplanted by Sierra and other graphical games. They died during an oncoming boom. Sierra's reign [and LucasArts earlier titles] in the late 80's to mid-to-late 90s were very much the golden age of adventure games.
Second, LucasArts went on for about 15 years after they stopped creating / releasing adventure games. Their last Adventure game was Grim Fandango in 1998, and the closed in 2013. I can't see how LucasArts closure is unrelated to boom or bust cycles in adventure games.
Third, there are a huge number of adventure games coming out all the time. It surprises me honestly. While a few companies--like Wadjet Eye Games and Daedalic--seem to be doing okay, the bulk of them close up shop after one or two games. To me--as a lover of these type of games and a reviewer for JustAdventure--The market seems overly saturated for such a niche audience. There is the occasional big event such as the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter, but the community doesn't seem to change size.
Unavowed is sitting in my review queue...
But in general, the crux of the matter is that games are still adapting to internet-age business models -- selling a title for $30-$60 with higher and higher development standards has been unsustainable for some time now. Going F2P is also hit or miss: not every game can be a League of Legends, and 99% quietly die running deserted servers with a tiny tiny fraction of the player base they may have had in their peak. It's the reason indie games have risen in popularity -- AAA studios are now just hoping to arrive at a hit franchise, and then furtively milk it for as long as they can, still fully aware they're one bad title away from biting the dust. Meanwhile thousands upon thousands of indies throw their life in the pool and a few good games reliably come out. Few hear or care about all the indies that disappear and return to their day jobs after a failed 5-year game. This model works fine for gamers, and making games is quickly becoming a cottage art industry like music or films - yes there are some studios churning out blockbusters, but mostly indies struggling, while consumers just get a glut of stuff at low costs. The unstable part is that most game devs can easily abandon the art for tech jobs with gobs of money, unlike musicians and (most) filmmakers, so it's possible the entire industry could die out if we enter an era of uninspiring games for too long.
But yeah, making an indie game is on average not a good financial decision.
I had forgotten about Sierra, probably because I was more into their Impressions city-builder and strategy games.
However there is left point in protecting from lawsuits when there will be nothing left that can be sued.
However I suspect that not paying out owed PTO may be a different story...
As I understand it, a severance usually involves the employee signing some sort of agreement.
Note that the caps are per state, but is sufficiently low that it doesn't replace a professional level income. Therefore if your lifestyle is based on an income of $50K+, you are strongly advised to acquire personal savings for emergencies in case you lose your job. And C-level executives frequently have contracts which specify severance packages that guarantee their income for an extended time if they are fired. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_parachute for more on that.
This can lead to weirdly misaligned incentives, like C-level executives on a failing company trying to get fired because their severance package will leave them better off than staying with the sinking ship.
If anybody is fired in the U.S. they are almost always never entitled to severance. Severance is primarily available for employees who have been laid off. Such companies would love to fire executives in the true sense of the word if they had cause to save on any costly packages.
This kind of contract term is not given rank and file employees. But I personally know executives who have been fired and kept a salary because it was in their contract, including one who was fired in the last year, and another who maneuvered to get fired a few years ago because the company was going out of business.
Also, companies avoid the term "layoff" because it could imply that an employee is entitled to be re-hired if business conditions improve. This can be the case in union shops. The term I've heard for a permanent termination without cause is "reduction of force."
Companies have to be careful about using "with cause" because they can get sued over it unless they absolutely have all of their ducks in a row. They will often pay the severance rather than expose themselves to a lawsuit and discovery process. They may also wait until there's a downturn, and get rid of the low performers all at once.
Of course like you say, if there's a contract, it can say anything.
What they needed is to have a less reputable CEO - mine paid out $2k for signing a non-disparagement clause when 3/4 of the staff were laid off and the rest moved to Vancouver.
In terms of TTG as a company, they got what they asked for. It's too bad it didn't happen before they hired their first non founders.
I'd been watching TTG since before they had a name. The rumors were that the devs from the cancelled Sam & Max game left Lucas to make a Sam & Max game. This was second only to Star Wars for me at the time.
I bought it as soon as a physical copy came out. (I don't remember if episodes came on disc or if I had to wait for the season). TTG had built DRM into the game that prevented you from using it in a virtual machine. TTG's website had made it sound like the DRM wouldn't prevent anyone with a physical copy from playing.
I contacted TTG. Their rep seemed to be reading of some BS script. He was condescending. He treated me like I didn't know what I was talking about for not wanting to use wine or dual boot. I returned the game to the store* and acquired a copy that had been patched to repair the DRM. After that, if TTG came up in a conversation I made sure to give the person a heads up that they'd just need to pirate it anyway.
* This was a small store, their policy defined games rendered unplayable by DRM as defective. This policy caused them to not carry future TTG games.
All others were failed financially and did not recoup costs.
So expensive licensing rights, expensive development due to 100’a of hours of voice acting and giving the first chapter for free to hook people in I think resulted in a very poor business model in the long run.
If you played one TTG game you played them all they never really developed their formula so it really bacame stale.
In WA state, "Unemployment benefits are made available through taxes paid by your former employer(s) to partially replace your regular earnings and help you meet expenses while you look for another job."
Not sure what the situation is in CA but I'd hope that, in the absence of a severance package, there's something else that can help them land cleanly here...
Basically it comes down to asking for "Cash Up Front". Expecting a cash settlement on the backend of a failed business transaction is fraught with perils of not getting your investment back in the company. And asking for severance is no different.
In the event of a bankruptcy leaving you with unpaid wages, you file an application with the same office that handles unemployment benefits, and they will recompensate you. C-level managers are exempt.
Better to just be transparent about things so employees can properly consider the risk in the situation.
I'm suggesting if people know that the company could go bankrupt, it helps them make decisions.
And that severance is a normal part of a contract otherwise
This seems like some kind of weird libertarian fantasy where companies and employees have access to the same information and use it to make rational economic decisions. In reality, almost any failing company will use its payroll obligations as a bank of last resort to squeeze out that last chance of turning things around, and there's no contract that would protect employees from that.
It's called the world we live in.
If a company's revenues are in decline, if there have been recent layoffs, well then the writing is on the wall.
A company folding should not come as a surprise to any of the employees unless the are utterly in the dark with respect to product development, revenues etc.
It's not a 'libertarian fantasy' to expect that employees etc. will have some idea of these numbers.
There's not much that can be done about solving the 'insolvency severance' deal. Severance beyond legal requirements is a bonus opportunity, and like all bonuses, it's subject to risk.
Most private companies are strictly compartmentalized and keep production employees in the dark about the business side. Some startups do the "anyone can peek at our sales numbers and cash flows internally" thing, but that's definitely an exception even in the startup world.
Nobody ever expects companies to be 'generous' that's not a thing - the issues are in contracts like anything else.
Regardless, I suppose the end result should be to make unemployment kick in faster so you don't need an insolvent company to provide a severance they don't have the funds to provide.
A severance agreement with a bankrupt company is worthless.
Obviously if the company is bankrupt they cannot pay.
Don't work for companies that are going, or could be going bankrupt. In the vast majority of the cases the writing is on the wall long before that happens.
Payroll taxes are just another form of income tax, the company doesn't really pay it, the employee does, economically speaking that money would go to the employee were those payroll taxes not to exist. The the co. does pay it is just an accounting issue.
And besides, if you explained to the employer the risks you forsee in joining their company, they will most likely understand that reason for asking for a higher salary than the norm.
Almost everyone directly involved in production of game titles (i.e. not middleware) would be financially much better off taking the skills they already have and working in another industry—e.g. management for game designers, tech for programmers—with the possible exceptions of artists and musicians.
In the course of my career, there have been many people from a variety of backgrounds that became full fledged software engineers. One was a truck driver who became a top Java coder at the company I used to work for.
And the game engineer has a step up on that guy, since he actually understands how to code. He just needs to understand the way the web works.
If that's true, why are you folks working in open offices and are wearing noise-cancelling headphones?
> "Cash Up Front" ... or immediate stock ownership to offset your personal risk
so a grant with no vesting schedule? please enlighten us as to what employers are actually giving out such favorable deals.
It's very similar to sports; there are many more people who want to work in sports than there are jobs available, so the ones that do end up with jobs working for a team are overworked and underpaid despite being in the top single-digit percentile of applicants. I imagine the same is true for other entertainment industries, but I don't know enough about them to comment.
There are, of course, people in these industries who do have bargaining power, but it's a very small minority of those with outstanding reputations.
I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s true. I mean debugging a race condition in C++ is going to be the same in a game engine as in a trading engine right? Except the latter will be well paid and secure.
I can imagine quite a few benefits, to be honest. You get to work with other people who decided to make the same sacrifice, meaning you have something more in common with your coworkers through your work than just picking the highest paying job. You get to say "I did this" and point to a part of a game that potentially millions of people are playing.
If I were evaluating two otherwise equal jobs, I could see myself taking a $5k or maybe even $10k lower salary for those kinds of benefits. The cost is much higher, though, (in terms of salary, job security, and overtime requirement) which is why I've never worked for a game company and probably won't in the future.
Besides joy, games can also bring social alienation and stunted development for kids and teenagers. I for one am not sure if games are making the world better or worse.
Callous would be working for a company that hurts people when your labor has enough optionality that you could work elsewhere.
I’m closer to “The people who got fired with no severance knew what they were getting into with this industry, and if they didn’t that ignorance is their own fault,” which might also be read as callous.
EDIT: I stand corrected.
umm, maybe start here and just ... I dunno, click around a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
Employers usually pay at least half, so this doesn't change my 2x-4x range.
So, if the employer no longer exists, and the employer-sponsored health plan no longer exists, the right to buy in is meaningless.
As employees, people are seldom under the delusion that they work for, e.g., ADP. My last company paid me through a processor. My direct deposits showed as coming from the processor. To any bank, it looked as if I was employed by the processor, but the employees knew who the employer was. Should the employer suddenly cease to exist and owe employees anything, employees will go after the employer, not ADP.
No, not really. Do a search of "insurance claim denied" and see who is on the hook. Even in the case when the processor simply decides not to pay.
The only good thing is since they hard laid you off you can immediately apply for obamacare/medicare and pay nothing out of pocket because you have 0 income other than unemployment.
* Hope your employer is compassionate and keeps you on their plan. I have no data on this, but anecdotally it is surprisingly common. Companies can be heartless when dealing with large groups of employees, but it is much harder to rip away Karen from accounting's health insurance as she is going through chemo.
* Hope your spouse (or parents if you are young enough) has insurance and they can add you to their plan.
* Buy in to your current insurance plan through various government programs (COBRA is one program that a lot of other comments are mentioning) . I don't have all the details on how this changed after Obamacare, but there were generally limits on how long you could do this and the costs were much higher than what your plan previously cost you and your employer.
* Buy a new insurance plan on the open market. This would have been obscenely expensive for someone with cancer before Obamacare's preexisting condition protections, but even with those reforms it still is a huge expense.
* Pay for your medical care out of pocket, which in the case of cancer will almost certainly result in you going bankrupt. Depending on where you get your statistics, there is something like 500,000 - 1 million bankruptcies in the US a year that are related to medical expenses.
Really? So, assuming there's 125 million households in the US, a person has ~25-50% (derived with simple probabibility math) of becoming bankrupt over medical bills at some point of their life? That sounds like BS.
See https://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-aca/pre-existing-co...
You just clutch your chest and say, "Help, I think I'm having a heart attack!"
Sadly, cancer doesn't qualify. Either you pony up $50,000 - $200,000 in the hospital lobby, or they call a security guard and escort you out of the building. Then you go home and die.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/03/who-...
The 1985 Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency services "regardless of ability to pay".
https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EMT...
Of course, you now how have the problem of paying more than double in premiums alone without an income.
It's fine to have subsidized higher tier insurance as an employee benefit, but basic coverage should be part of normal social security, or, in an ideal universe (or nordic country), something that hospitals don't even bill for because a few billion from taxes could go into the healthcare industry instead of military or roads.
Most insurance in the first half of the 20th century was bought privately, but few people wanted it. In 1942, with so many eligible workers diverted to military service, the nation was facing a severe labor shortage. Economists feared that businesses would keep raising salaries to compete for workers, and that inflation would spiral out of control as the country came out of the Depression. To prevent this, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9250, establishing the Office of Economic Stabilization. This froze wages. Businesses were not allowed to raise pay to attract workers. Businesses were smart, though, and instead they began to use benefits to compete. Specifically, to offer more, and more generous, health care insurance. Then, in 1943, the Internal Revenue Service decided that employer-based health insurance should be exempt from taxation. This made it cheaper to get health insurance through a job than by other means.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...
The answer in 1942 would have been, "don't subsidize employer-based health insurance." The answer in 1962 would be have been, "remove the subsidies and let God sort it out." The answer is 2018 is...well, kind of like replacing the engine mid-flight. An entire tumor-like system has grown around various market incentives and it can't just be 'removed' without putting the host at serious risk.
It's kind of a shame it turned out this way because it's given insurance a bad name, unfairly IMO. Insurance is actually something that the market handles reasonably well and it's a product worth buying depending on the situation. Catastrophic insurance can be (and, to some degree, is) fairly priced.
There are many health-related services that make no sense to be covered by insurance, though. Doctor visits, routine procedures, pregnancy - it doesn't make sense to insure oneself against any of those events. Rather, they should either be paid for out of pocket or a single payer system if you like.
Sure it can; the ACA marketplaces were the first step. If they hadn't been systematically undermined, the next step after they were established and stable would be shifting tax incentives to avoid favouring employer-based insurance, and the final step would be removing employer mandates and maintaining the individual mandate.
The problem is that it's not a cancer, it's an active parasite that protects itself against the host.
Aside from the pointless religious bit, that answer is still the correct one today.
Indeed, if any policy question is answerable via "remove the subsidies" then that answer is the correct one.
"Too big to fail" really means "too big", period.
Tangent: from where does the president draw the authority to do this?