Telltales Walking Dead won multiple game of the year awards on top of many others and the games sold pretty well to begin with and when they were a small studio creating a handful of projects they were on the up and up & doing well. Had it been just another FPS zombie shooter in a sea of them I doubt it would have gained any of the accolades it did. They won awards and their games were being critically acclaimed & they expanded and acquired more and more licenses (where issues began) & employed a lot more people . In Oct last year they were still claiming
that 2018 was going to be their best year yet. Then they had to further downsize by 25% by Nov “in order to be more competitive as a studio”.
What if I told you they could have sold more copies than they did? They don't need to be in the FPS genre, they could really make that dream of "The Walking Dead in Resident Evil" game. What I mean by this is going for the realistic, third person shooter schtick. Most of the time, Walking Dead is about survival horror where you have to scavenge weapons, do puzzles, and battle the hordes of zombies. Their take on The Walking Dead would have stuck out in the hordes of zombies games. The reason why Zombies in Call of Duty is popular, is because it was originally a secret mode, and Treyarch saw opportunity to open it up and give fans what they want.
I just think it's just one big missed opportunity by Telltale. Most of their games were mostly "copy and paste" from another game they made. Turns out, they've been making games since the PS3/Xbox 360 days. Hell, I even think that their take on CSI was also a missed opportunity. It could've just been a TPS title with detective mechanics - How do you think Heavy Rain succeeded where these people really didn't? High production, and quality control. Then, there's marketing. They partnered with the franchise owners on marketing, but from what I saw, it was this ordinary marketing strategy - slap TV show footage, logos, fonts, and then a little bit of gameplay. Not really a good way to entice gamers to buy the franchise's
GAME. I love CSI. Or shall I say,
loved the franchise. I watched most of the CSI shows until the network pulled the plug. Telltale didn't really capture what made the franchise -
the show to watch.
Purely based on reports I have read and things I have seen, it seems that the problems stemmed from mismanagement and those mistakes. They expanded too quickly, took on far too many projects, acquired too many licenses at a cost and their awful engine was further highlighted when people had more products to analyse and more issues to work through.
In the end they bit off more than they could chew, oversized the team and worked their employees into the ground & split those teams to work on too many different projects spreading their resources thinly and it became their undoing.
Their projects quality suffered, had delays & large waits between some episodes & series and that heart and soul you saw in the early games looked like it was being lost. By the end they were nothing more than a conveyor belt of licensed games all in the exact same mould. When it starts to look like a developer doesn’t care anymore and they are merely taking the cookie cutter route and you can see their heart & passion isn’t in it, gamers stop caring too.
Mismanagement isn't really much a problem, as money. A lot of people are overlooking the money issue. Telltale relies too much on licensing and the franchise owners' willingness to market and sell the game for them. Nonononononono. No. It should be BOTH of you marketing the game.
Telltale, by this time, should already have the "pedigree" to say "this game is hot!" And pour all their talents, work and ideas into that particular game. Look at Rocksteady, they've done exactly what I said. They have the pedigree to do this and that, without any input or interruption by Warner Bros. But they rested too much on their laurels, became complacent, and ultimately gave up as your
bolded message says.
