Telltale Games: the Lesson About Capitalism That Nobody Wants to Learn From
The games industry is abuzz with news that popular game developer studio Telltale Games, put on the map for its beloved title “The Walking Dead Season One” is shutting its doors. An outpouring of support from game studios across the world is reaching out to the hundreds of former Telltale employees who were laid off in a mass firing that a class action lawsuit from former Telltale developers alleged had violated California state and American federal labor laws. Some would say that the rest of the industry is callously scavenging, picking the Telltale corpse clean, looking for little morsels of talent.
What happened? How could Telltale, a well-known and popular game studio known for a uniquely cel-shaded art style, shut its doors now after years of game development? Well, perhaps this graph will illustrate the problems.
It’s not pretty. The above graph depicts the sales of Telltale games on Steam since the studio opened its doors, and what we see here is very disappointing. Games commentators and “Let’s Players” have pointed out that it may be the case on this graph that all of Telltale’s other game sales combined may still be less than the sales for its flagship, the Walking Dead Season One. TWDS1 put Telltale on the map, as we can see, its most popular game by far. They captured lightning in a bottle, and that was exactly the problem.
Because anyone who has had a hit success knows that trying to capture that same magic again, to use that same formula again to strike it rich one more time, will fail more often than not. Maybe you really can’t capture that lightning one more time no matter how much you want to, and if your business model completely revolves around that premise, you’re putting the success of your studio, and the wellbeing of your developers, on a knife’s razor-thin edge. This is only part of the disaster that is Telltale games.
Talk to any former Telltale game developer, and they will describe a horror story. Sixteen hour work days, almost every day, for a year. That’s not just horrible, that’s criminal. Multiple games being developed within a single year, taking 3–6 months to create a game. With that little time, no solid work can be done in terms of polishing and perfecting your gameplay engine, or updating your graphics capability, or improving your models, or thoroughly bug testing your games. You’re basically just slapping new assets onto a previously made template and shipping it out. You’re just putting out cookie cutter game after cookie cutter game, and that’s generally what Telltale games are. What you end up with is a buggy, disappointing mess, similar to the old EA Sports games that put out the same old, tired, “new” releases every year. It’s assembly line, it’s cookie cutter, and it’s dreadfully boring.
“Your choices don’t matter.” That is the mantra of those who criticize Telltale’s games for their lackluster choose-your-own-adventure format where in the end, there are not that many radically different endings Telltale games can have. The games have to therefore mess with the player’s head, make the player think that their choices are meaningful, and then immediately invalidate those choices to push the game toward a singular ending event.
The ending of each Telltale game episode is a cliffhanger event that no matter how good the player is at overused QTEs, no matter how they navigate dialogue trees with all of the complexity of a football quarterback’s attempt at a history paper, there are certain cliffhanger events that will happen no matter what. Telltale marketed their games around the value of the player’s choices, and in the end there were so few real choices to be made. What does that say for the “ludonarrative dissonance” of playing games from a game studio that doesn’t want the player to make meaningful choices?
Perhaps the most meaningful thing that Telltale ever did was create an entire genre of choose-your-own-adventure games where the player can’t affect the narrative very much. The greatest accomplishment Telltale ever achieved was perhaps robbing players of their own agency in an art form entirely centered around the concept of player choice and direct player input. In a way, Telltale may in fact be questioning what a video game is, really, because without choice that matters, these aren’t games; they’re interactive TV episodes with clunky controls and arguably bad visuals. Perhaps Telltale should have written TV instead of video games, they’d have done gangbusters in the world of daytime soap operas.
Telltale games’ approach to drama ends up being a bit like real life in a way, that there are plenty of sometimes bad things that happen to us with terrible consequences that we can’t control or affect. Perhaps that is part of the point: create a game format that removes choice from the game to teach us that life isn’t fair, or perhaps we are not the masters of our own destinies. Was Telltale making scathing meta-commentaries on the entire game industry itself? Probably not, that would have involved too much thought. Or perhaps Telltale just wanted to play god, with all the subtlety of a kid pointing a magnifying glass at an ant hill on a sunny day. Why is he burning all the ants? Because he can. Fuck you, that’s why. That’s how Telltale approaches their games, that’s meaningful writing to a studio that was doing the same torture in the form of illegal business practices to their employees.
But a more important fact comes up when you gain any knowledge of the greater video game industry as a whole: Telltale’s treatment of its employees is not an isolated incident. Many developers do this. I would know, I’ve been playing video games for a quarter of a century. We all know these things are happening, and we’re choosing to ignore them. Many developers are callously breaking laws, overworking their employees, and punishing employees with layoffs.
If the game doesn’t sell, you don’t blame it on games journalism or your marketing department, no. Somehow it’s the devs’ fault; as if good press in games equates to good games, period. While good press often does correlate to good sales, that has nothing to do with the actual quality of the game. Under the Telltale business model, a good dev team can’t make a good game on a small budget and a short deadline, and then are punished for lackluster sales with labor abuses, pay cuts, and layoffs.
You might think, “well, they can just go work for a different company, right? If say Bethesda doesn’t work out for a promising young game developer, they could just go work for Ubisoft, or Gearbox or something, right?” Sure, but that’s only if their original employer hasn’t bound their employment contract with a year long, or multiple year long non-competition clause, a standard clause within contract work that says, “if you work for us, we own you. No matter if you quit, or if we fire you, you can’t go work for the competition. Either work for us, or not at all.”
Perhaps some of the abuses in the games industry are deliberate; to ensure high employee turnover rates because they know that there will always be a fresh crop of young men, fresh out of game or animation school, passionate about video games and wanting to develop or test them. That is until they get so abused by the company they work for, they lose the passion, and the light in their youthful eyes goes dead. They won’t report these abuses because they’re young, new to the job market, uneducated in labor law, they don’t know what their rights are. That, and many of these big name companies specifically lobby against workplace unionization, which prevents at least some of these abuses.
Sad realities of the video game industry were born from abuse, and unfairness. Bad business practices become industry standards, that because these practices shifted the games industry into a new trend, and/or generated massive profits in the short term, they become acceptable. Something such as microtransactions, a gaming concept that may have originated in the seedy, sketchy world of mobile gaming to capitalize upon gambling addicts in order to extort money out of them cents at a time, became acceptable in an industry that never should have allowed such a thing to happen in the first place. I heard buzz online that Activision touts as a positive that they made about $1 billion in 2016 from microtransactions alone. Blizzard made $4 billion from micro alone last year. That’s not innovation; that’s predation.
Pre-ordering games before the game is even finished is another such practice. I will never pre-order a game in my life after I pre-ordered No Man’s Sky, and I regret it to this day. Purchasing good reviews from IGN, Kotaku, or Polygon is another. Yes, there actually is an ethical problem within video games journalism; a silent little problem that was conveniently buried in an avalanche of vitriolic debate about gender politics, and whether women “belong” in the gaming world.
They do, actually. I can’t believe that I have to say that women belong in video games, we should have good female characters, women can make video games, and they have every right to play them, and change the course of the industry. But I was very sad to see that hateful screeds about women ruining video games dominated the “Gamergate” conversation. A sad fact, because game companies purchasing good reviews for bad games is happening, and it capitalizes on the problems of corrupt video game journalism to lower the overall quality of the games we get to play.
Abusive practices simply become “the cost of doing business”, regardless of if that is a good idea for the long term health of the games industry as a whole. Especially if it isn’t good for the industry, but as long as it’s profitable. And yes, I am arguing here that profit is not the be-all-end-all of good business. What’s happening to the video game industry right now is a lot like if pro athletes were being paid to inject Krokodil into their veins. Sure, it’s lucrative, but it’s killing you, and you don’t seem to care. In what universe can we conscionably blame talented, passionate game developers for bad business practices made by management? Apparently, in this one. Telltale Games’ failure is something neither unique, nor new. And that “let’s do that one thing one more time” mentality is rampant.
The success of Resident Evil 4 as a fresh, new (if controversial) take on the Resident Evil franchise spawned RE5 and 6, two abysmally performing jokes of games that cost millions to make, and underperformed rightfully, because they were generally terrible. You could even say that the more character action, shooting focus of RE4 eventually paved the way for the laughably uninspired failures of Operation Raccoon City, and Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps. For all intents and purposes Resident Evil was dead, until they developed 7 and tried to go back to the old school. RE7 was pretty well received, a breath of fresh air. But can we really retrieve success after we strike it rich so long ago? The same thing happened with Konami, in their terrible decision to dissolve Team Silent back in the day.
Silent Hill 1 may not have been super popular around the time of its release, but it has since become a cult following game, considered to be a masterpiece. Silent Hill 2 is considered by many to be perhaps the greatest horror video game, if not the greatest video game period, ever. Silent Hill 3 was also extremely well-received, and brought new dimension to the burgeoning Silent Hill mythos, developing the story of Harry Mason and his daughter Heather’s battle against the Cult of Silent Hill, against Dahlia and Alessa Gillespie.
When Silent Hill 4: The Room was released, it was mixed in its reception. Team Silent wanted to go in a new direction, with a Silent Hill that was a little more action oriented, a little less of the “classic” Silent Hill. But because sales were down for SH4 compared to the purists who wanted more of the same that we received in SH1–3, Konami really wanted to recapture the magic of the original. In perhaps the worst decision of their entire company’s history, Team Silent was dissolved, and Konami tried to get a new team to capture that lightning in a bottle with the old Silent Hill.
Their next few attempts were generally so poorly received, Konami ended up basically killing its entire Silent Hill franchise. The whole unreliable narrator, “your life is not what you think, you’ve forgotten something terrible” story arc of Silent Hill 2 worked wonderfully in the deeply sad, personal story of James Sunderland, and his wife Mary Sunderland-Shepard. Silent Hill 2 was fresh, new, subversive, horrifying, and heartbreaking. Silent Hill 2 was the first game I had ever played to make me cry. The first game that ever made me feel real, honest, vulnerable human emotions. My heart broke for Mary and James, I hated him once I realized what he had done, and I was stunned by her suffering, and her ability to (in the best ending) forgive him. But once Konami saw dollar signs, the magic was gone.
The next several Silent Hill games tried and failed to do that again. Downpour was mixed to negatively received, Homecoming was almost entirely negatively received. Origins and Book of Memories are generally terribly received as well, Book of Memories is so poorly received in fact that many Silent Hill fans say that Book of Memories isn’t canon, and just never happened. No matter how much they tried, Silent Hill just couldn’t go back to the old magic. And what is Konami now? A crumbling dinosaur trying to port Silent Hill to shitty Japanese pachinko machines, what a travesty. Konami itself is now basically a failed dynasty, desperately clinging to its glory days on life support.
How did Konami fail where Capcom may have succeeded, not just with RE7, but with the highly anticipated RE2 remake? I don’t know. What I do know is that just like the movie industry, for the games industry to be recycling our nostalgic childhoods back again isn’t really working for us. Look at the movies we’ve had to endure. The Star Wars prequels, and now fresh outrage over the Star Wars sequels. Remember Dragonball Evolution, or the live action Dead or Alive film? How about the garbage Paul W.S. Anderson Mortal Kombat films, remember those pieces of shit? M. Night Shyamalan’s Avatar the Last Airbender made me want to kill myself.
The Ghostbusters remake was terrible, the new Jurassic Park movies are shit, the live action Ghost in the Shell was a joke, and the live action Power Rangers was a terrible mess, as was the live action Speed Racer. Not just movies, but Netflix is shitting out a bunch of poorly received Japanese live action remakes of beloved classic anime. The live action Attack on Titan was terrible, as was the live action Death Note, as was the live action Fullmetal Alchemist. They’re dong Bleach and Avatar the Last Airbender now; again. What’s next? Cowboy Bepop, or Fist of the North Star? Gundam Wing, perhaps?
The lesson that should be learned here, that nobody wants to learn, is that just like Telltale games, you can’t just recycle the same old bullshit back to us and expect it to be good. The thing is that these companies, whether they be movie companies or game companies, often know that their products are not new, innovative, or good. Take the EA Sports games, or Call of Duty, or Assassin’s Creed. Their artistic stagnation ends up not mattering in capitalism, because we really can’t actually vote with our wallets. The people who always buy the crap are a big part of these problems. Those who will gleefully consume terrible media on principle because of a name are the problem in a lot of industries. They are the real life version of Gluttony from Fullmetal Alchemist, and it’s a serious problem.
In a sense, the problem lies with consumer culture and capitalism themselves. When you know it will sell, when sales are guaranteed because of a brand name, when you know that half of your consumer base will still buy your shit no matter how bad it actually is, then the effort to make something good disappears, because you know that you don’t have to. You can, you should, but you know that you don’t have to, and that’s a problem.
When has Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty ever meaningfully, boldly deviated from their standard models established in their first games? Never. Are the stories good? Not really, maybe one or two do something interesting. Are the actors good? They’re bad more often than good. Are the characters even interesting? Yeah, sometimes; you get a few exceptions like Soap or Adewale, but in general it’s getting really old, really fast, and you’d never know because with a few exceptions, COD and Assassin Creed games usually sell pretty well even when they’re bad.
Even the Assassin’s Creed Rogue game still sold about 2 million copies. If it was so bad, why did it sell at all? Now, I’m not arguing here that Assassin’s Creed games are therefore good, they’re usually not. AC2 and AC4: Black Flag are pretty much the only good ones, but that’s the point. Anyone who argues that capitalism creates a meaningful innovative product doesn’t understand how video games and movies work.
Even the supposedly indomitable Marvel films are stagnating, a lot of movie journalists and commentators are talking about franchise fatigue, and fans are begging for something new, but they still go to see the same old shit. When is the last time that you heard of a Michael Bay movie being good? And yet the crazy son of a bitch still makes movies! Even Uwe Boll, or Tommy Wiseau, widely considered to be the worst filmmakers ever, still get millions of dollars in budgets for their hilariously bad films. It’s not enough to try to boycott, because for one you usually can’t get enough people on the internet to collectively do anything, unless it’s hating women gamers.
Secondly, boycotting is not an effective method of “dollar voting” anyway. Because the point is, in capitalism, boycotting doesn’t really work. We have no power over what video games and movies are being made, we have no power to ensure their quality, and we have no recourse for when developers make bad games or studios make bad movies, other than completely impotent internet slacktivism in the form of do-nothing internet petitions, which are proven not to work. We’re trapped.
Corporate overlords will continue to pump out bullshit until they end up crumbling under their own weight. But hey, that’s capitalism. We’re just paying the price economically for the failures of these studios, it’s no big deal. We like the abuse; we say, “thank you sir, may I have another?” And our money is just going into the hands of one percenters who are laughing all the way to the bank.