Telltale Games Reopening to Work on Old IPs and New Games

telltale games reopening

Today the announcement of Telltale Games reopening shook many fans of the studio’s narrative-driven adventure titles. Last year Telltale Games shut down due to a combination of having taken on too much work for them to handle, and financial difficulty that was exacerbated by the episodic format of their game series’. Now however, it seems like the company is back to build even more of the adventure titles we’ve come to love them for.

In an interview with Polygon the two new heads of Telltale Games, Jamie Ottilie and Brian Waddle, explained how they would be keeping the studio small for the meantime. Ex-Telltale Games employees have been offered freelance positions, and the new owners have said that full-time roles are something that they’re looking into as a possibility for the future. Currently the reopened Telltale Games owns the rights to The Wolf Among us and Batman, two of the core series the company is known for, as well as an older Telltale Games IP, Puzzle Agent. Ottilie added that there are some other expired licenses that the company is looking to acquire in the future, but didn’t say what they were.

Ottilie and Waddle want to continue where Telltale Games left off before they closed their doors. At the time the developer was working on releasing the final season of The Walking Dead. That series is firmly in the hands of Skybound now, and therefore will not be seeing any future releases with Telltale Games. The company had also only recently announced a partnership with Netflix to create a Stranger Things series before they closed, but that IP is now back with Netflix, it seems for good.

Ottilie said he purchased Telltale Games because he believes that the games industry needs a studio that is dedicated to producing narrative-driven adventures. Right now there is a void left by Telltale Games, and there’s no better developer to fill it than the original. When speaking about the episodic format of the company’s games, Ottilie said that the schedule of these, and indeed the decision to make them in that format, was sometimes a poor one. However, he has confirmed that the episodic format of their games isn’t going to change in the future, hinting that a series could release all at once, instead of over a number of months.

With consumers now preferring to binge-watch an entire series instead of waiting for episodes, it seems as if the games industry is ready for something similar from Telltale Games. Only time will tell if this is the direction they choose to move in.

Source: Polygon

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