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Telltale Games – it can not be denied that they have had a significant impact on the popularity of story-telling games. Famous for their The dead who walk series and The wolf among us Telltale has created a unique episodic narrative form that emphasizes the importance of the player's choices. The company specialized in creating ramifications of intrigues and gave more agency to the player, allowing his choices to assign plot points and later character relationships. Their games have been a source of inspiration for many people – including myself – and once it was a brilliant narrative light in an industry populated by first-person shooter games like CS: GO. Innovative in his stories and faithful to his comic book style, Telltale had revived the public's love for longer narrative games.
Unfortunately, in a statement released on September 21st, Telltale announced that they were starting a "majority studio closure after a year of insurmountable challenges." The layoffs left 90% of the company's employees unemployed and without severance pay, ie more than 200 people. suddenly left without work and without financial support. Although the video game industry is not particularly stable, these collective layoffs have been a shock to fans and employees of Telltale.
According to CEO Pete Hawley, the company's growing financial insecurity played a decisive role in its demise.
"It was a difficult year for Telltale as we worked to give a new direction to society. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to get there, "Hawley told IGN. We have released some of our best content this year and have received a lot of positive feedback, but that did not ultimately lead to sales. "
But financial insecurity seems more of a symptom than the real problem; The success of YouTubers video games – "Let's Players" – and a detrimental change from Telltale's usual narrative style may be a more likely cause of the decline in sales.
Telltale's premiere The dead who walk The series was a huge success. Composed of four "episodes", each with a few hours of play, the game incorporates elements of the popular TV series while creating an entirely new story. Rather than telling the story of the TV show, the game was inspired more The dead who walk comics, an inspiration visible both in the history and in the artistic style of the game. To add an element of individuality to the game, one of the main means used was the agency of the player: it exists special moments in history where the player has to make an important choice, which will significantly affect the rest of the game's plot. Because of this mechanism, there are not two identical parts.
As their success grew, so did the society, which began to create games regularly. However, customers have complained that the new games have lost touch with the nasty "choice", where the players' choices have no significant impact on the rest of the game. Each player would end up with the same story, regardless of the choice he made in his phase of play, and fewer people would buy the game. Instead, playthroughs on YouTube became more and more popular. – if every story was the same, why buy the game if he could watch it play for free? These two factors, along with the increased uniformity of the games, may have resulted in lower sales, which resulted in financial difficulties for Telltale.
However, on September 25, four days after the collective dismissal, the company made an announcement.
"Several potential partners have come forward to express their interest in helping to see The Walking Dead: The last season Telltale said: "Even though we can not do anything today, we are actively working to find a solution that allows episodes 3 and 4 to be completed and disseminated in one form or another. ".
At first, it seems positive, but this statement only fueled the fire. Former employees and fans were furious that Telltale was outsourcing the developers to finish a product, without providing financial support to the workers who developed the game for years. It's incredibly difficult – almost impossible – to hire a brand new team to complete a product that the previous development team had left behind. Many Telltale employees have developed the series since the beginning, infusing voice and personalities into their work. The outsourcing of game developers will not lead to a game similar to those they have already produced and imposes the idea that game developers are replaceable – that their voices and their creative work are not distinguishable from others. In a field that relies heavily on a coherent and creative vision, this false hope is insulting to both the more than 200 licensed employees and their customers.
In addition to the controversy, it was revealed that Telltale workers were incredibly overworked and abused during their employment.
Hannah Bradshaw Lozier, a former employee, said via Twitter"Everyone was underpaid in Telltale, but programmers who could have gotten six-figure jobs elsewhere took between $ 30,000 and $ 60,000 a year, PAY CUT, to come and work for us."
They had repeatedly asked their employees to outperform and exceed "reasonable limits", creating a culture of toxic stress without any kind of compensation. Several former employees also talked about the constant work overload, with some employees working long hours without pay for overtime, sometimes spending over 100 hours a week pushing a product to the end of the line. development. Although this is unfortunately not a rare practice, this revelation has opened the eyes of the public to the problems of manpower in the video game industry.
But all former Telltale employees have not lost everything: in a big move on Twitter, gaming companies, large and small, have come to the rescue of over 200 unemployed people by posting job offers and speaking to Telltale elders. Links to GoFundMes sites, Twitch feeds and other donation channels appeared by the dozens, testifying to the strong support of the gamer community for the creators of the stories that they loved and the incredible possibilities of setting networked social networks.
Telltale Games was an important figure in the video game industry, but its fall is a telling sign of the need to change something in the video game industry to prevent further abuse.
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