On Friday it became known that the studio Telltale - everything. Closes, goes bankrupt, horror and nightmare.
What happened? Let's figure it out. (Poll under the cut!)

Proof of

First things first, namely: what is your evidence?

Well, here they are. This is the appeal of the general director of Telltale to the general public.

In short, Pete Hawley claims that they have improved the quality of the content, but this has not brought additional revenue.

Right now

What does this mean for us, as for studio customers?

Walking Dead status:

• there will be no last season;
• The third and fourth episode will not work;
• all the rest will not work either, of course;
• To be with the money on pre-orders is unclear.

Second Wolf Among Us will not be:

Yes, nothing is no more.

However, there are a number of employees left to complete the work of Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix.

The number of laid-off employees is still not reliably known. At the start, about 225 people were known, but Emily writes that 250:

Emily , Jess and, dragging something, all the other 250 people are looking for work and openly tweeting about it.

In order to leave the office, the employees were given only half an hour. Is that normal at all?

Anonymous sources claim that the company filed for bankruptcy in order not to pay for dismissal. But in general, not all employees worked on the staff, and the severance pay was not due to contractors.

On the other hand, a number of large companies called all these people to their place; former employees independently organize “job fairs” and invite everyone there. Most likely, everyone will find work for themselves.

It's funny that on this company's twitter on this ill-fated Friday there appeared such a tweet:

It seems that he just posted a robot on a schedule. The same function is for corporate blogs on Habré. Tweet, of course, immediately cleaned up, but check out the depth of irony. Telltale's latest joke .

Prchiny

Journalist Joe Parlock, who dug up anonymous information, argues that if it were not for the deal with Netflix, the company would have gathered much faster.

A year ago, the co-founder, Kevin Bruner, left the company. Regarding the closing of Telltale, he wrote a separate post in which he confirmed the studio ’s financial problems. It is quite possible that the first season of the Dead was almost the only truly financially successful project of the company - and of course, the beloved Wolf was not such a success. The marketing of a number of projects such as Game of Thrones was terrible - only a handful of players know about a good, in essence, game.

But the problems there were much bigger and deeper than the inability to communicate with the calculator.

The problem is that (in the opinion of employees), management treated employees as if it were puschechnom meat. It was normal to first hire a crowd of people , make her work in an atmosphere of endless trawling, and then fire her to hell. In November 2017, the company announced the dismissal of 90 developers, that is, about a quarter of the staff, but this did not help them much.

The culture of endless crunches, which are expressed in work 20 hours a day , more than 100 hours a week, added fuel to the fire . Thanks to this and a number of other features of the marvelous corporate culture, the coolest developers of the studio quit, and there is a great article on Habré .

Now on Twitter, most of the employees write the warmest and flattering words about the Company, but their sincerity gives rise to doubts. Well, you know who will take to his people who spoke badly about the previous employer. Who will take to himself the people who may not have grown professionally, and burned out, doing the same stupid work under the pressure of terrible crunchy. This image is not profitable for anyone to create.

A separate article would like to mention the terrible decision to switch to Unity from its own engine. Probably, it is clear to everyone that if some special miracle and divine intervention does not come into play, the conversion to another engine means a technical restart of the project. The fact that this is exactly what happened is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the Wolf Among Us release was postponed to 2019. That is, the team was driven to such an extent that there were not enough people even to support their simplest engine, which, in addition to the other things, was already developed and working.

It would seem that the world's evil got what it deserved. Who among us has not dreamed that the hated employer who fired us for anything, finally got what he deserved?

Unfortunately, along with Telltale, we got 250 of our fellow developers (even if there were very few programmers there), and wonderful games that were made in spite of everything, and which will forever remain in our memory and our dreams.

Rip