Don't work in the games industry. This is the par story for game companies. Every little detail of this story I saw repeating on loop in a decade of working in games. The artists grabbing assets to stuff into their portfolios before two years of professional work disappears into a black hole, the ppl moving families across country to be laid off months later, the crunch, the over promising, it is all text book.<p>The games industry preys on young ppl who don't know what a healthy work/life balance looks like. The pay is lower because employees are passionate. Passion doesn't pay rent. It doesn't provide stability for your partner and children who all will suffer because you chose to work in games.<p>Your passion will be compromised endlessly by marketing and management who can air drop in and change a game's entire direction in one meeting. Because they saw a Minecraft commercial and their kid responded to it. They'll make you work weekend after weekend to fit their pivot into the original schedule and stop in for an hour to drop off donuts. Oh good, eight hours of work for a donut. Donuts also don't pay rent. They don't fix your marital problems.<p>Games is an industry stuck in a groundhog day loop of misery. This is my warning to anyone who thinks they like games enough to make them. You won't like them after making them. It isn't worth it.
Sometimes you simply got to let the data speak for themselves:<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX</a><p>It's so strange how the prestige around the brand was not correlated to the sells numbers. It so strange how their demise was so unexpected by the press and gaming communities when the writing was on the wall long ago.
I feel sorry for the employees and apologize in advance if what I'm going to say sounds too negative or blunt, but anyway here is one opinion. Telltale games wasn't a very innovative company. It shouldn't surprise anyone when a company goes bankrupt that primarily produces bad game adoptions of blockbuster movies as a franchise.<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm only a gamer and not an industry expert, but it seems to me that too many managerial constraints on creativity and fear of innovation are the #1 game company killers.
<i>"years of nonstop crunch culture, toxic management, and frustration from developers who believed the company’s refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation"</i><p>I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
Having been in this exact situation before, its very hard to deal with. One of my employers died at 4:30 on a Thursday, we had 30 minutes to get out of the office before the building management locked the doors, there was no health insurance or severance for anyone (in fact as a contractor I was owed $8000 I never got). At least we all had some idea things were bad so it wasn't a complete surprise. This of course was during the Dotcom collapse so finding another job took me a long time. I've been in company ending situations since then but no matter how many you never feel good. It's easy to feel like you didn't do enough to keep things running (of course its not true) which doesn't help your attitude much. Your job is almost like a family sometimes and that makes it harder. If the employment market is hot its much easier to get over the shock but if its hard to find another job then its much more depressing.
I can not understand how it is legal to dismiss a worker with less than 14 days notice. Those are great workers rights! Thanks god we still have some of them here in Spain (although some have already been diminished).
“/../ hundreds still tumbled into unemployment with no safety net from their company.“<p>To be honest a company that can “barely keep its head above water” wont be in shape to provide a lot of support. That is kind of the point, if they could do that then maybe they could keep the company afloat which is a bit paradoxical.<p>It would be nice situations like these to have some form of safety net in form of financial aid or something. I have no idea what they do in the US but in Sweden you can get a lot of help since these things happen with companies from time to time.
> These sources [...] paint a consistent picture of a company desperately struggling to keep its head above water.<p>No? Manager start doing this when their profits dwindle, not when the company has no cash left. The basic idea is to get one or two more bonus checks while the others lose their homes. You can be sure that some people still made a profit.<p>> “[Hawley] came into a situation where the staff needed a strong leader with a clear vision,” says a former employee.<p>Does anybody remember how Dunder Miflin tried to pursuade the stockholders by presenting Michael Scott as the hero who would turn things around?<p>And one thing I don't really get is why one brings oneself in a situation where one works ones ass off in exchange for living paycheck-to-paycheck. You should have a decent amount of spare time (or time for personal projects at least) and turn a profit, otherwise why work this job at all? I mean gaming industry is not a career you work in because you need to feed 3 children and don't have another choice.
You can tell a lot about how a game is doing when you pay attention to the "let's play" videos on Youtube. People have been complaining about how short telltale games were, how they always look the same etc. for a while now. I'm surprised the company didn't try to do things even a little bit differently.<p>The gaming industry is a tough place to be. I have so much respect for game designers, 3D artists, animators. Because it takes a lot of time, skill, rendering and sleepless nights to get something good out. Unfortunately, most game companies are controlled by mediocre people at the top, who run things like a sweatshop.
Ultimately most of these game studios are working for Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Valve.<p>More pressure should be put on those mega-corporations to reduce the commissions they charge developers who release games on their platforms - currently 30%.<p>The consoles are not supercomputers anymore like the PS3, they mostly use off the shelf (AMD) hardware and x86 architecture. Soon they will just stream the game directly to a thin client which will only handle time-sensitive calculations like input and collision. On PC this 30% commission is even less justifiable since the platform is open and there is no hardware for Valve to get involved with.<p>Cutting this commission would immediately put money into the hands of games studios and improve conditions for workers, whilst still leaving the platform holders ridiculously profitable. Its a shame no one has been first to move on this - Microsoft with Xbox would seem a good candidate given their desperation to attract devs to the platform and away from PS4/Sony.<p>I think Telltale is just classic bad management. Not much different from other industries. I think the industry can make for a good career - find a small-ish studio with a string of successful releases and low overhead (no crappy legacy engine to maintain, cheap location).
I don't get how there is not a general insurance system for people losing their jobs unexpectedly which pays out three months of similar or something similar.
> "These sources, who were granted anonymity in order to speak freely and without fear of retribution,..."<p>What retribution? They were fired with no severance or time to prepare. Why don't they just speak out against the company that doesn't exist anymore and left them on the street?
I hear about game studios going under like this a lot.<p>Is it just that games companies suffering the same fate get more coverage in the media, or is it something about game studios that seem to make them more likely to crash and burn like this?<p>I know that games are quite consumer's-whim-driven and you're never really sure if you've got a hit on your hands or not until you release. I guess it is the same for movies, yet I've never heard of any movies spectacuarly just going bust half-way through filming and just abandonning what they are doing and packing it in (although I have heard of some near-misses). Yet it seems to happen a lot for games comapanies?<p>What gives?<p>P.S. sucks for the people working on this. Hope you all find something new!
Absolutely sh!tty way to treat people. Won’t those left demand massive retention bonuses?<p>How fungible are game dev skills? At least folks are getting released into a hot tech market.