TWD: A New Frontier - Episode One: Ties That Bind

Sorry. It's not that I sought that out just to make that post. I was reading through this thread and come across that and... well, yeah, it just made me think of how glad I am that he's gone.

If studying ecology in high school taught me anything is that smaller populations can suffer huge impacts even if the perturbation is minimal, specially when compared to larger populations.

...

... The fuck I'm on about?

Probably looking up telltale employees' play time across achievements on steam. Y'know, like people here did for TWAU2. If there's a new method of finding something we (and by we I mean usually Tormunds) are the first to know.

It's clear something went wrong after Bruner became CEO. Seeing what happened after that, it's clear that his vision won over the board - quick and cheap development (likely outsourced a lot more than their previous titles) of short episodes. This is also the moment that something truly went off the rails.

(...)

Then comes Batman and I'm 100% sure that Telltale felt underwhelemed by how low it sold, but this is also where Bruner's hypothetical vision for the company completely fell apart. (...) And then the disaster happens. The game has a godawful PC launch, with lots of gameplay/graphics bugs and glitches;it turns out that the console versions have a lot of these issues too. (...)

But then there's a wave of refund requests (as it could've been evidenced on Steam discussion groups). And Telltale, for the first time in YEARS, knows that they fucked up big time and tries to do damage control. They release one patch during the first week of release, and then - before the finale - another major patch that optimizes the game. It doesn't work, sales are still low. (...)

This is the sign that Telltale's in trouble. Batman underperformed, but hey - one mistake might happen, right? But here's the catch - they have TWDS3 announced as their fall title.

Guessing from all the behind the scenes stuff that resurfaced recently (...) they realized that after Batman fiasco they can't take any chances and probably decided to play it safe - or maybe they didn't have enough money to follow through with their original plans. (...) TWD3 was likely quickly rewritten or scaled down from the 'big' game to a typical TT one (railroaded, little-to-no hubs, choices with no impact) to make the release date. The game probably didn't have its storyline finished before release. (...)

People simply grew tired of TT's shtick. Other developers showed they can do choice-consequence games better while Michonne, GOT and Batman were either panned or received polarized reception by the fandom. People simply decided they're not going to settle for a subpar story and buy whatever TT pushes out.

Now TT desperately announced Guardians, coinciding with the release of the movie to build up on the hype, but they know they're fucked. Now they're trying to scramble a cohesive story for TWDS3, Guardians is a question mark. GOT2 might be their last resort.

Batman was the first mistake and ANF is another. The next ones might be quite costly for TT.