It's so strange how the prestige around the brand was not correlated to the sells numbers. It so strange how their demise was so unexpected by the press and gaming communities when the writing was on the wall long ago.
Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game. Their articles often read like someone who is hoping for a regular media house to notice and hire them, rather than a gamer writing for other gamers.
Gaming's biggest personalities are on YouTube and Twitch. ACG, Angry Joe, TB (rip), Dunkey have a significantly better say on whether a game gets played or not. Brothers a tale of sons, is one such game whose success can be in part attributed to TB pushing it very hard, on his YT channel.
Among the younger generation, let's play and streamers are the bigger influencers. At least that is what I feel like looking at my younger cousins.
There are a few good gaming review websites, but the likes of IGN, Polygon and GameSpot feel like surrogate marketting agencies at this point.
And I wish these kids would get off my lawn!
I have learned to never listen to Dunkey when he says a game is "Boring" but his idea of "Fun" matches well with me.
Also I watch some of the Angry Joe reviews because despite his tired theme of being angry all the time, he does a good job extensively covering a game from a semi objective standpoint. And I know when he is hammering home the negative points he is just hamming it up for the views so I don't take them too seriously.
Meanwhile gaming press is just a random assortment of editors with different tastes and values making it harder to discern how well the game will be for me.
That's why I like giantbomb since they are only 5 ish reviewers and you get to learn their tastes pretty easily.
Funny, it seems to me that many gamers don't quite get that not everyone has to have fun exactly the same way they do.
The real question is how influential are they today? I think they might not be that influential when it comes to AAA titles, however, some outlets are extremely influential when it comes to indie gaming, since it's a small scene where "knowing the right person" can make a difference when it comes to coverage.
My problem with the press is that there is essentially 2 categories:
- marketing outlets AKA content farms such a IGN,Gamespot who add very little value to the content they produce as they seek quantity over quality.
- pseudo-intellectual outlets like Eurogamer or Polygon which talk about gaming through the lens of "intersectionality", which is their right, but after 10 hours of work getting yield at by my manager I'm not interested in articles that are more about identity politics than the games I play when I get home.
Personally, I take more pleasure in hearing Joseph Anderson babbling about hitboxes in Dark Souls 2 and how you get critical damages even though the NPC sword stroke was PI/2 radians off your character's position, for 3 hours straight on youtube than any of the former.
Yeah, um, that won't get your average gamer excited either.
HN User 'lmm' was right, everyone from the gaming press, to the youtubers, to the people at the conferences etc, publicizing things that the average gamer could care less about. No one cares about hitboxes off by Pi/2 radians, or your "high art" narrative based games, or your slick C# or Rust based backend server and how cool it is.
The press and the youtubers are, of course, free to focus on whatever they want to focus on. I'm just saying that a lot of people out there are just using games as an escape, we really don't want all those details. And I'd go even further, a lot of games, tech, and issues they concentrate on are out and out boring!
How does that differ from movie and music press? It's pretty much the same situation - you have big blockbusters which are polished and ground down to be as widely appealing and as mildly offensive as possible. These blockbusters then get ridicoulous marketing spending which shoves them down the throat of as many average people as possible.
But studios like Telltale have no hope of even coming close to competing for that attention - they have nowhere near the marketing budget of Ubisoft, EA, Activision. They need to appeal to smaller niche audiences to not get just eaten by large publishers doing the same thing better and with more pomp.
Limited personal experience, but: the music journalists I've known really loved music. Many were in their own bands. There was a certain amount of indie one-upmanship, there was also a deep appreciation and respect for the medium in general, even when faced with genres they didn't get on with. They also spent a hell of a lot of time on music, even when not on the clock. I don't get that sense from video game journalism at all; if anything several of them seem to wish they were movie critics. The depth of detailed technical knowledge just isn't there - music and film journalists throw light both on the techniques used to make music and film, and the process of production itself, in a way that video game reporting doesn't.
How representative it is of the overall picture I can't say. I would imagine that Telltale's style of games sell more on phones/tablets and on consoles, but of course the sales on those platforms may well show the same trends over time.
I understand the limitations to this style and the problems became pronounced as time progressed but to have a "Telltale take" on a property, I roughly knew what kind of experience I was getting and at least for a while made me cautiously optimistic for the release (though I may be a minority.)
Usually the events were cutscenes or QTEs (timed button presses) that you either pass or get a gameover if you fail too many.
Now this wouldn't be an issue if the games were marketed as such but instead they tried to present them with the taglines "Your choices have consequences" while it was clearly not the case. You could run the same game twice making completely opposite choices and the end results were always the same; sometimes a character would die but at most that just resulted in some extra dialogue since those characters were designed to be non essential.
Here is an example of what I mean: Alice is a fugitive on the run and needs a car so she can:
1)Go to her friend Bob and have him drive the car after asking him 2)Threaten Bob to drive her around
In the end Bob is always driving the car and his opinion of you doesn't matter outside a throwaway line where he says "Hey, you owe me!" or "Hey, you're a jerk!"
The illusion of choice is very apparent at times even DURING the game since the events occurring are just too limiting.
It didn't help that Life is Strange and the Witcher 3 came out and had more in depth consequences and exploration of these systems.
That said, your description of the illusion of choice in the story... sounds like every story-based videogame ever. I've been playing games since the 90s, and I can't really think of any such games off the top of my head where your choices will lead you down a completely different path.
Commonly the game will have different ending cutscenes depending on your choices, but the main story quest always takes you to the same locations.
Deus Ex was lauded for giving you choices, but you always took the same general path through the game. Maybe you saved that character and then you meet him again for a short conversation much later - but it didn't really matter.
Planescape Torment is often described as the best story-driven RPG ever written. While it had lots of optional sidequests and offered the option to roleplay your character in loads of different ways, in the end you always took the same path through the main storyline.
These are just two examples of higly rated, character- and story-driven games that happen to be among my favorite games of all time.
It's understandable, after all creating content costs money, and content that won't be seen except by a tiny minority of players seems like a sunk cost to the developers.
Meanwhile, Deus Ex was revolutionary because it gave you a lot of choice in terms of gameplay variety. Your mission could be to enter a building and just some of the ways could be:
A)Sneak Inside through vents B)Bribe a guard C)Impersonate an employee finding a loose ID card D)Use your high jump to go through the roof E)Shoot your way in F)Use a keypad by overhearing the password from a guard E)Use an explosive to break down a wall
Telltale games did neither of these things and got left behind pretty quickly when it failed to innovate off the success of the Walking Dead
While story based games do have to fight combinatorial explosion of possibilities, games like Planescape Tormet deal with that by having actual gameplay: random encounters, item drops, side quests, leveling up. All the traditional RPG mechanics.
Life is Strange was also panned for having the illusion of choice, but I think was able to resist some of that criticism due to the strength of the story, and the different environment: most of the game is peaceful and sullen, not thrilling, so the limited gameplay isn't necessarily a problem.
Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human are excellent examples in that your choices actually matter. For example, it's possible to lose a character much earlier on and drastically change how the whole story plays out, or choose an action which entirely changes a few 'stages' you proceed to. There are also a lot of different versions of the ending, either by showing totally different ending scenes, or tweaking some scenes with different characters, or additional cutscenes that change the whole meaning of the ending.Gameplay was also very satisfying for both games, from the things you can do in each stage or the Quick Time Events (QTE) which also change how the story plays out.
In comparison to Telltale's games which are supposed to be about how your choices matter, the only thing that gets affected are some throwaway dialogue and maybe a few short scenes. QTEs are also laughably simple and nearly impossible to fail, and if you do fail you just restart in the last scene anyway.
The strengths were in the writing and voice acting.
Also your argument is flawed. After all, all football matches are the same.
eg. assassins creed series, farcry series, call of duty series, madden series, etc. etc.
Look at the ridiculously popular battle-royale games like fortnight.. They are pretty much clones of each other, and that gameplay has been done (better) decades ago.
As an aside, I loved Tribes 2 construction mod.
Battle royale was available, long before battle royale was cool.
There were also a lot of other gameplay available on top of death match, all built in: team death match, assault, onslaught, capture the flags, domination, etc...
If you look at good players who win their games, it's a lot about being at the right place at the right time. Get the best stuff and locations for yourself and don't let opponents have anything.
Sorry, but you're talking about something completely different.
It seems like what you're describing is definitely the mainstream take on the genre right now, but I think you could make another variant that isn't like the popular ones today but is still a BR.
That's exactly why we play BR games.
These days I play mostly PUBG. Before that, Day of Infamy. Before that, Insurgency. Notice a trend? Each one of those games has a lot at stake (relatively speaking) when you get into an engagement. If you die, you sit out for a while. They're about communication and coordination between players on the same team.
PUBG (and Fortnite, though that's not my preference) take it to a whole other level. It's not uncommon for me to play a game of PUBG where the first 10-15 minutes is spent either not encountering anyone or spotting them before they spot me and purposefully avoiding them. It's about tactics - either coordination with your squad, or maneuvering into a better position for the next phase of the game, or waiting until someone you're stalking has engaged someone else before engaging them.
Because the preparation is longer, there's more at risk when you actually engage, and the anticipation builds to a crescendo. So, yeah - there may only be seconds of "action" in a PUBG match, but that's the whole point.
This is Fortnite build battling. BR as a whole just refers to a game ruleset that forces and encourages a last-man-standing situation. That part has been done before there was a video game. But the details of what's being communicated are different. They're different even between Rust and PUBG, despite both of them being military styled. Fortnite is in a class of its own since it's cartoonish and the building and mobility options present a lot of unique options. Even comparisons to Minecraft don't fit since the build system is different.
Performing jadedness about the games being "done before" is basically like saying new movies are just collections of old cliches. Even when they are, they end up saying something different.
I'll just keep playing Quake (actually I'm mainly playing puzzles and graphic novels right now) until people get tired of Battle Royale modes and need a break from them.
Unreal and Fortnight are made by the same company by the way. It's really a reskin with adjusted gameplay settings.
Edit: also, games made after a movie license (or a game license, Minecraft Story, wtf?) tend to be crap. Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.
Weren't most of Telltale's stories original? I didn't play any of the others, but I know the Borderlands and Batman ones were.
Personally, I played Borderlands but I never stopped and thought "oh gee, it would be nice to find out more about their background story". I just looked for the next thing to shoot. As for Batman... saturation anyone?
Telltale had a chance to take the Visual Novel, clean it up some for more Western sensibilities, and really create a market here for the genre.
Instead you just got a badly rendered machina. It was unfortunate.
That said, I've heard great things about the writing for Minecraft Story from adults. So, you know. If your expectations are appropriate, there's room to be impressed.
That said, yes, I think The Walking Dead Season could accurately be described as a Visual Novel with very little branching, more than a full-fledged point-and-click adventure. I think it succeeds at this; Lee's story is certainly more interesting than whatever happens with Rick & crew in the tremendously repetitive TV show. I can see how Telltale's formula gets repetitive for subsequent games, since it's essentially a one trick pony, but still... I was entertained for one season :)
A big notable example is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13 trilogy (3 games, FF13, FF13-2, and Lightning Returns), where IIRC sales basically halved on each release - so Lightning Returns sold about 0.25x what FF13 did [1]. (FF13 sold well, so this is at least not completely dire).
You can often make this up by spending less money to develop later episodes & sequels, which was true for both Telltale and the FF13 trilogy - but eventually it's not sustainable anymore.
1: http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/27/lightning-returns-lowes...
Which makes sense, now that I'm hearing how the company was managed - coming up with really original ideas, and making sure they work, takes time and breathing room. You get that out of people that have time to put their feet on the desk and daydream, not people that live on perpetual crunch time.
Another factor is that many of these games are 'prestige brands' like Minecraft or The Walking Dead, which means there may be partnership funding involved. This is demonstrated by how Telltale spoke about keeping a skeleton crew around to finish a game in order to fulfill obligations to partners - if that's happening it's because money changed hands.
(I agree in general with the premise that the writing has been on the wall for Telltale, just not that a steamspy chart is proof that the company was already dead in the water)
But of course, names don't tell the full picture, and even major brands can sell poorly if the product isn't interesting/great (like many later Telltale titles).