The story of Telltale Games is a tumultuous one. After an initial high start with their highly acclaimed The Walking Dead game series, the video game developer began to lose steam as their formula appealed less and less to general audiences, translating to poor sales and eventually even liquidation in 2018, famous incident that saw the staff forced to leave immediately after the announcement with no severance to speak of. Now, after being acquired by LCG Entertainment and seemingly back on track to making the high-quality narratives Telltale was known for, it seems that past events have repeated, as many members of the Telltale Staff were laid off in early September.
As jjonahjonahson says in his Twitter thread, he can’t reveal the exact details of the downsizing, but these mass firings have become troubling trend in the industry lately, from EA releasing 200 Apex Legends testers in March to CD Projekt Red laying off 29 Project Sirius developers in May. Very recently even Bioware laid off their unionized QA workers, Mediatonic laid off much of their staff, and Naughty Dog followed suit. Stories like these seem endless as of late, and now Telltale Games is the latest in a long list of developers releasing workers en masse.
This is especially worrying for fans of The Wolf Among Us, as Telltale Games announced The Wolf Among Us 2 was in development in 2018 after being acquired by LCG Entertainment, before announcing that it was delayed until 2019. Then after years of radio silence until they claimed it would release in 2023, and then recently it was said to be pushed back to 2024. Now, with the recent news of the layoffs and The Wolf Among Us 2’s troubled development, it seems very likely that fans will never see the sequel to the highly acclaimed fairy-tale-centered game.
These mass layoffs are a terrible pattern for the video game industry this year. It seems like the only thing developers, their staff, and their fans can be sure of going forward is that many things will be changing, for better or worse.