Telltale Games Success Secret

    The editors of App2Top.ru decided to find out the reasons for the success of Telltale Inc. games, including The Walking Dead: The Game and Law & Order: Legacies. About five approaches to developing singles on mobile platforms and the prospects for this genre of the game, read below.

    image

    Telltale Games has been releasing games on mobile platforms for more than two years, and its six-part horror Walking Dead: The Game is popular among users of iOS devices. In total, the company received $ 15 million investment from IDG Ventures SF and Granite Ventures to develop their projects. In addition, Telltale Games doubled its staff this year, and the company plans in the spring of 2013 to increase its team by another 40 people.

    Much of this success is ensured by the principles Telltale Games adheres to in developing its games. In total, we identified 5 main approaches:

    1. Episodic format

    Small studios can create large projects only in fragments - they simply won’t pull it in any other way. Firstly, the development costs of the game will be progressive, and you won’t have to spend all your energy and money right away. If the first parts of the game will be profitable, then you can take on the following episodes.

    Secondly, when developing each new "series" of a single, developers can take into account the wishes of users. Plus, regular updates can be sold for an additional fee. With constant work on content, a single game can become a full-fledged serial service.

    2. Work under license

    To reduce marketing costs and get an audience that accurately downloads the first episode of your game, you can use IP. Starting from its first project (the Bone serial quest based on Jeff Smith comics), the company worked on this principle.

    3. Practical approach

    In order to put the entire process of game development on the rails, it is more convenient to create a single toolkit, an engine that will be sharpened for a specific genre. At the same time, the development of a new game and each of its episodes is built on the same principles, only the content will change. This will save both the budget and the working time of level designers and scriptwriters, whose tasks are already defined by the existing framework. The only negative - the engine has a number of technical limitations, which means that the same framework determines the conditions for the further development of the project.

    4. Multi-

    platform The more platforms a game is presented on, the more users it can reach. This should not be forgotten.

    5. The plot

    In Telltale Games, the main emphasis is on the plot. It is the plot that can sell the project and keep users watching each new episode. The game turns into more than just interactive entertainment.

    For example, the studio’s last blockbuster game, The Walking Dead's horror drama, was released in five episodes, each of which appeared at intervals of one to two months. In the first two weeks of sales of the episode 1. New Day, more than a million copies of the games were sold. Such a powerful start on the basis of the plot about the zombie apocalypse from the original comic book allowed the studio to develop the project further.

    image

    But the most important thing in creating an episodic game is the presence of hype around the release of each new part of it. And here a powerful plot will play a role: you can cut the story between episodes at the moment of climax. And within a month before the release of a new part of the game, heat up the interest of gamers with teasers, reviews and promos.

    Also popular now: