Telltale Autopsy
shamusyoung.com
shamusyoung.com
For me there were always red flags, they tried too hard to chase the dragon after the unexpected success of TWD, all of the sudden they were churning out 2-3 titles a year (17 individual episodes were released in 2017 alone) with an aging engine. They were constantly missing out release dates for episodes and unable to update their games for new experiences.
Also do not forget that licences for these properties are very expensive to procure making it even more difficult to break even.
They also added an Exec from Zynga as their CEO in 2017, which for me represent the very worst gaming has to offer in terms of low effort, exploitable gaming.
This was the final nail in the coffin, unsustainable business practices with high level execs who only care about the bottom line always breeds failure.
Its a shame, a lot of people knew the end was coming but management kept quiet until they literally had to close up shop and gave people a few hours to leave the building. All the workers there deserve better.
What does this phrase mean? A google search game me results about heroin use which I don't think that that's what you meant.
- Really bad (one sided) deals on IP.
- Taking on more than they can chew.
- A domino effect of failures.
- Failing to adapt.
It sounds like basically everyone saw the writing on the wall, but no one expected the end to be so inhumane.
Edit: The stream was https://www.twitch.tv/thatguytagg. I can't find the VOD though.
I used to work for another studio with the same publisher.
Obviously, that didn't work out in practice (and the complete lack of transparency about running out of money is horrific), but the firing of the CEO and some of his cohorts, and the former CEO suing the company he cofounded for firing him, are objective facts, independent of whether you believe the story of why he was fired or why this would have been different.
Having worked for a bit as a contractor, and knowing how close to not having reliable funding for some of us the small contracting shop I worked for was at times, I'm less surprised by the lack of warning than I might otherwise be, though a place sufficiently large should definitely have been more...robust against that failure case.
The whole thing leaves a horrendous taste in my mouth, because I liked some of what they did (I never found TWD appealing, for whatever reason), but after I found out how horrendous their working conditions were, I couldn't convince myself to buy any more of their work.
And now I'd like to hope this will be a cautionary tale about trying to live on the knife edge of viability, but I suspect it will just go down as something where the founders take shallow lessons but not the substance behind them to heart.
[1] - https://variety.com/2018/gaming/features/netflix-telltale-st...
[0]: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?s=this+dumb+ind...
You shouldn't do it with an expectation of any great rewards. You should really only do it if you are so passionate about the field that you don't have a choice.
Because of the high number of passionate people in the field the risk/reward ratio will always be skewed against you and most people will not be properly compensated for their work.
To get 1,000 True Fans to commit we probably need to expose the product to 50,000 "True Fans". Hoping for a 2% conversion rate.
To reach 50,000 True Fans we will probably have to create awareness with a larger group of potential True Fans that have a strong connection to your Fandom, maybe 500,000.
To reach 1/2 a million people you are going to have to get well beyond a few posts to your niche subeditors or making the front page on Hacker News.
If you come up with some great advertisements and eventually starting landing your $100 per year True Fans, it might end up costing you $20 each to find them. Not a huge problem... assuming you can do it. It's tough because in addition to coding your own app you now had to learn how to be a pretty decent user of AdSense or Facebook Ads. That is very possible, but it does eat into the time you have to work on your core business.
And now you need another 200 fans to pay for the ads you have been buying.
I've always wondered how much cash Double Fine burns through to stay in SF.
The documentary on Double Fine releasing Broken Age sort of touches on this as it chronicles the journey from idea, kickstarter, development, and release. In there there were some small layoffs or needing to shift people to bring in more money. Tim goes through some visual changes as well as the stress mounts.
There may be a laundering component to it, though. If you're a fund manager, and you can't steal the principal directly, you might be able to invest it in a company that you can then require to set up headquarters in a place where you personally own rental property and service businesses. Chances are that some of the money you give to the company in your capacity as fund manager will come back to you in your capacity as landlord/business owner. Then you can turn around and invest that in your own employer, if you feel like it, so you can also buy in to all their outstanding lottery tickets.
This is just possible. It is not guaranteed to be happening.
Why is demand rising so fast? Because people are moving there.
Why are people moving there? Because that's where their employers want them to work.
Why are employers locating there? For some, prestige address. For others, proximity to investment capital.
What does proximity have to do with investment? Couldn't a VC gain competitive advantage by locating in some other city that doesn't have such vicious competition for unicorns?
I don't have an answer to that. It doesn't make sense to me as a strategy, because I have incomplete information.
It probably is inflated due to ego - Juicero certainly didn't need significant talent (or have it for that matter) but if you are developing something that needs complexity like say self driving cars or their parts it could pay off.
Also, proximity to talent. If all the other game developers are in the same area, it's easier to recruit employees with "come work for us, we're 2 blocks east" than it is with "come work for us, we'll pay relocation expenses".
For developers in general, remote work is an option, but specifically for the highly-collaborative creative work that goes on in game dev (and especially the genre Telltale was running) a remote culture is a _lot_ harder to get right.
About 50% of the people I meet moved here from somewhere else. It's easy to recruit people with "Come work for us. We can't give you more money, but we can offer more purchasing power, which is better. The homes within a 15 minute drive of the office--even at rush hour--are less than $1500/month."
For their story-heavy games, it seems like Telltale might have done okay with a location near the Georgia film industry, especially with the Walking Dead television show operating out of Riverwood Studios in Senoia, south of Atlanta.
If I give you $10, tied to an agreement that you both mvoe to town, and will eventually pay me back (in expectation) $11, and I also own property and suchlike that cause me to (in expectation) get another $7 from you in living costs, then my ROI is 80%.
If I just rent to whomever, I'm not getting the profits from the initial investment, but I'm also not driving up the rents by getting people to move to town. My expected ROI is at least a little bit lower, and possibly quite a bit lower.
Not saying it would actually work out in practice, or that this is something that's being deliberately engineered, but it at least seems plausible.
In my imaginary property model, the VCs make money regardless of whether the companies they back succeed, while the investors only win 1 out of 7 times, upon company successful exit. To the investors, it _looks_ like they've put a lot of money in the startups, but a significant portion of that goes back to property rental companies via salaries and office rentals. Which would be lower anywhere else, which is why I suspect the VCs are disincentivized to move companies elsewhere (or invest elsewhere). They make the most rent here.
But I don't actually know anything factual, like how many VC people privately hold heavy investments in bay area REITs. Even a well-intentioned (dedicated to making their client companies successful) VC would be a fool to not invest in REITs, now that the cycle is here, but after a few years of that and seeing where their money really comes from, I wonder if they can keep their good intentions.
That might have two implications: First, more startups are able to get funding in the first place, and, second, of the ones that get funded, the average amount of money they raise is much higher.
If so, then it's not necessarily that more companies insist on starting out there, so much as that it's a sort of survivor bias: The Bay Area's business climate is just one that is able to grow more startups to a big enough size that you hear about them.
The trick is that it really helps to attract talent if you are based in a place where people want to live and are likely to find other employment. Once you are established in your career, if you move for a company you ought to like living there. And if you like living there it helps if there is another place you can work if something happens to that company.
[Edited for grammar]
Citation? Because I always thought that game studios switched to these because they were “easy money”, not because they were fads. Critics and journalists disliking a thing is different than it not being a successful strategy.
Fade in games go something like this: a workable formula makes someone a lot of money. They rise and at a certain thresholds major publishers take note and iterate, crushing the original. Then other publishers inject said mechanics into their flagship games until people are so sick of them that they can’t stand it. There is a reason why all of the big upcoming shooters like CoD IV have battle royale modes.
To a lesser extent fads can burn out without studios ever really getting into it because it’s too small (relatively speaking of course). Surgeon Simulator set of years of “simulator” games ranging from I Am Bread to Black Screen Simulator. Eventually we got Shower With Your Dad Simulator which subverted the genre a bit, and set of another explosion of imitation. These indie fads tend to follow that pattern of initial massive explosion followed by secondary ignition when some slight twist on the formula introduces some air to the. mixture, and this repeats with smaller explosions until the last dregs of fuel are exhausted.
Zombie modes are another example, as are hero shooters like OverWatch (the “big thing” before BR). Remember LawBreakers? Exactly.
https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-try... What we’re seeing now with BR as it played out last cycle.
But it would seem the most important aspect is really the declining sales every year that could likely be due to business decisions from the top or simply a cash management issue where the cash at hand was not getting replenished at hand fast enough which again could be a business decision gone wrong based on overly positive sales expectations.
"A company where the president picks dumb products, wastes money, and hires unqualified losers is dysfunctional. A company where the president builds a cult of personality, fires people who criticize him, and hires unqualified friends / relatives is toxic.
After reading The Verge article, it sounds like Telltale suffered from both problems. They were dysfunctional in the traditional sense of making lousy business decisions, but they were also dysfunctional in the more specific sense of being run by one or more jerks."
Maybe Apple managed to survive (thrive!) despite of the jerk, but that doesn't mean one wouldn't bring down a company on a less robust standing that may have otherwise still managed to keep the right trajectory.
Perhaps Apple survived because the jerk was doing a good job where he was, despite being a jerk?
Maybe he only wasn't nice to people but didn't hire his incompetent friends, etc. Maybe he was so good at other stuff that a negative jerk effect was not enough to offset the positive parts.
But my point was that according to the definition given in the article I don't think you can say "the jerk effect" was zero at TT, I think the author made a convincing argument.
"The culture is toxic." : The problems are caused by one or more individuals, who may be insurmountably difficult to fire. Actually firing the offending people is likely to correct the course quickly.
"The culture is rotten." : The problems are caused by dysfunctional processes, which may be insurmountably difficult to amend. Firing people won't help, unless their replacements are an order of magnitude more competent, and empowered to enact changes.
I don't think rotten can be fixed unless toxic is fixed first. In this sense, toxicity is the more immediate problem, in that it prevents detection of deep structural issues and potential repairs from being approached in a timely and constructive way.
FWIW, I thought the first Walking Dead was super interesting. It reminded me of those old Choose Your Adventure books. I had a blast playing it because it _felt_ like there was weight behind the decisions. After beating it, I started a fresh game so I could go through a totally different path / play style and... the illusion shattered. The choices didn't have any notable effect on the game.
And that was that. I just wasn't interested after the first game.
However, after the walking dead, the walking dead, wolf among us, minecraft story mode... they kinda feels the same. And as you say, the games are not a divergent graph like witcher 3 or the avenged is. It's more of a fork/join graph, with very low distance from fork to join.
From there, I had no interest in their other games, tbh. I bought Minecraft Story mode entirely because I like Petra, but that's about it.
It's a shame. I haven't connected with stories in video games for a while. I still long for the emotional depth of Mass Effect and TWAU. Telltale was one of the good ones.
I've wondered about this, VC's aren't stupid, what's the disconnect?
If I were starting a company in CA I'd go to Davis. (FWIW)
And what’s in Davis? For all intents and purposes it’s just more expensive Atlanta
Considering all the "talent shortage" whining, it doesn't seem like they can find many in the Bay Area either.
> Want to hire some ex-faang empoyee? Fogetaboutit.
Most startups should fogetaboutit anyway. They don't need ex-FAANG employees, will waste precious runway hiring them for little marginal gain, and will be hard-pressed to give them all meaningful work to do (leading to spending even more money in short order to replace them).
To your second point, faang employees are much more likely to pass any interview process (based on my extensive interviewing experience at my current gig) so you’re saving money on recruiting at least.
But we're talking about starting a company. Typically you'll already have a technical co-founder or someone, no? If you grow you can grow to SF. Has no VC ever asked, "Would you be willing to relocate to <CHEAPER CITY> for two years?"
> And what’s in Davis?
UC Davis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Davi...
> In 2006, Davis was ranked as the second most educated city (in terms of the percentage of residents with graduate degrees) in the US by CNN Money Magazine...
~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California
Have you been there? It's nice. :-) It's close to the Bay Area and has lower costs and UC Davis. (And you don't have to put up with the constant cold winds! It's toasty there all year 'round!)
Is UCD so much better than Georgia Tech? Some might disagree.
Not surprised it has most ppl with degrees - it’s probably mostly school staff and some intel employees.
It’s not that close that you can actually drive to the bay in a reasonable amount of time on a workday
Save millions of dollars?
> Is UCD so much better than Georgia Tech? Some might disagree.
But then you'd be in Georgia...
> Not surprised it has most ppl with degrees - it’s probably mostly school staff and some intel employees.
That's my point: it's a University town crawling with smart people.
> It’s not that close that you can actually drive to the bay in a reasonable amount of time on a workday
So what? It's not Outer Mongolia. You can visit the city easily. I'm not suggesting a daily commute.
What would anti-union libertarians say about the labor conditions there? Workers should just avoid the game industry until more tolerable and better-paying workplaces arise? How is organizing workers not a valid solution to the problems there? Do they think that unions will somehow make the situation worse?
To the extent that unions improve worker conditions, they do so in part by restricting entry and thus influencing the supply side. In general unions tend to benefit people already in the industry at the expense of people outside who'd like to join, among other groups. Whether that's a desirable outcome depends on large part to which group you either belong or care about the most.
It doesn't work that way for knowledge workers and creative types. Some people are rare talents, some people are just okay. Some people fill wear 5 different hats and cover responsibilities outside their title. One artist may be the visionary behind your greatest success, another just follows orders, but both are on the same team and at the same level of the hierarchy.
If you force a system where everyone makes the same salary based on how long they've worked there, the best people will leave. But if people negotiate for themselves, it isn't collective bargaining anymore, and you don't have a union.
Want to prevent burnout? The union negotiates for rigid 9 to 5 hours. Many creative people will hate it. Or you let people come in when the want, but they have to fill out a timesheet, can't work overtime without the approval of both a manager and a union rep, and have to adhere to rigid guidelines.
Unions can't work without bureaucracy, but creative people and creative organizations don't work well with bureaucracy.
SAG WGA DGA
Last I checked all the best people in those fields were members.
Do you have a good example of engineering unions? The only one I know of is the SPEEA, and I know of it because one of my friends quit a job to escape the union defined hierarchy and the associated culture.
Knowledge workers are largely cogs. No game project can be held hostage by one or a several critical employees. A majority of game jobs have already left California, with drop in replacements in Shanghai or Montreal or Austin.
I can only suppose that people with perspectives like yours have convinced themselves and others the possible is in fact impossible for no discernible reason.
And the actual, real life results for most unions today... is not great. I am not even talking about industrial era stuff. I am talking about existing examples of unions.
If this innovation and disruption of the union industry was so easy, then someone would be doing it. But they aren't.
And I have no reason to believe that techies would be any better at solving the inherent problems of unions, better than all the other people who have tried. IMO, it would inevitable run into exact the same problems as the ones you see today in existing unions.
How else should we judge things, than based on their results?
IE, the existing electric cars in 2004, were better than the electric cars made in 2003. And the same for 2005 cars, compared to 2004 cars.
This happened, until eventually they became good enough that people started using them, but there was still noticable progress along the way.
The same is not true for unions.
The unions in 2000, were not noticably better than the unions in 1990. There is no steady and obvious progress, or linear regression that can be extrapolated into the future.
IE, for these other technologies, they were clearly getting better by X% every year, using a measureable, objective metric. Battery life, or screen resolution or whatever.
You do not see an x% increase in an obvious objective metric for unions.
There is no reason, philosophical or technical, why a software dev union would need to have rigid 9 to 5 hours or wages based on length of time on the job.
Unions lets workers assert some meaningful control over the operation of the company, instead of simply relying on management to give them conditions they like. A union of creative folks could absolutely reflect the working conditions creative folks like.
It actually works quite well for Hollywood, and for scientists and researchers...even though these industries are heavily talent-based.
Unions negotiate based on the needs of their members. Some unions, like the Hollywood unions, negotiate job protections, benefits, and salary minimums. Members are free to negotiate better deals.
The union would prevent burnout by making a company hire 5 people to do those 5 jobs, instead of overworking 1 person.
Maybe this would cause the company to fail - but needing employees to work so much unpaid overtime is just another unrealized failure mode.
Yes. There are too many people in the industry pursuing their passion product, as opposed to doing something because it will be successful.
If you act like an artist, expect to be treated like one. And artists are treated.... poorly by society.
Not that I don't support the general idea of working on things that you like. I have a couple side project myself, that I am doing for fun. But I have absolutely zero expectation of success, and have a day job (that I like) to pay the bills. I am not going to pretend like my side projects could support me.