Telltale Games announced on September 21st, 2018 that it has laid off all of its staff save for 25 employees who will stay on to fulfill the company’s “obligations” to board members and the partners. This likely includes finishing up some of the remaining episodes for The Walking Dead: The Final Season and begin the process of either liquidating assets or looking for a buyer.
The news came courtesy of a tweet from the official Telltale Games Twitter account.
— Telltale Games (@telltalegames) September 21, 2018
In the letter CEO Pete Hawley stated…
“It’s been an incredibly difficult year for Telltale as we worked to set the company on a new course. Unfortunately, we ran out of time trying to get there. We released some of our best content this year and received a tremendous amount of positive feedback, but ultimately, that did not translate to sales. With a heavy heart, we watch our friends leave today to spread our brand of storytelling across the games industry.”
According to Gamasutra, the skeleton staff still on board will work to finish out The Walking Dead: The Final Season and then it’s potentially lights out for the company. They also noted that all their projects that were in the pipeline have been cancelled.
Update: Sources close to Telltale have informed us that the company’s current projects are being cancelled and a small team of 25 is remaining to finish The Walking Dead Season 4.
We’ll update our official story once our site is back up (our apologies for the downtime).
— Gamasutra (@gamasutra) September 21, 2018
What this means is that you will not be getting a Stranger Things game, nor will you be getting a second season to The Wolf Among Us.
Some reports indicate that it’s also not guaranteed that The Walking Dead: The Final Season will complete its season and that things are sketchy beyond the release of the second episode at the end of September.
As noted in the announcement by Telltale, they will address the future of their properties at a later date.
