Telltale Games to return from closure

Following the company’s assets being purchased, Telltale Games is set to return to the world of games development.

Having shut down last year due to issues surrounding finances and the lack of sales of their episodic game series’, Telltale Games is set to open once again. When the studio shut down their assets were purchased by LCG Entertainment, and now the relaunched Telltale Games will sell some of the company’s back-catalog titles, whilst working on new ones based on some of their pre-existing IPs.

Jamie Ottilie and Brian Waddle will head up the new Telltale Games, whist some other original employees will work for the company on a freelance basis. Apparently full-time positions are thought to be a possibility in the future.

Jamie Ottilie has been based in the mobile gaming industry for most of his career, having founded and working as CEO for Galaxy Pest Control most recently. Brian Waddle on the other hand has a wealth of experience in the industry having run sales and marketing for the Havok game engine.

It’s been confirmed by Ottilie that Telltale Games has the rights to licenses such as The Wolf Among Us and Batman, as well as much older franchises like Puzzle Agent. There are a number of expired licenses that the company is currently looking into.

The plan for Telltale Games is to continue where the company originally left off with many of their games. However, The Walking Dead is firmly in the hands of Skybound, and won’t be returning to Telltale Games. Similarly, the previously announced Stranger Things game series has returned to Netflix.

Ottilie told Polygon in an interview that he purchased the rights to Telltale Games because he believes in what the company was creating. He explained that the games industry needs a company dedicated to producing narrative-driven games, and it was management decisions in the past that led to the company’s closure. It seems that Ottilie plans to rectify the mistakes made, and align Telltale Games with a much more viable strategy for developing and selling their games.

The concept of episodes will remain with future Telltale Games titles, Ottilie has said. However, the pacing needs to be adjusted in accordance with what the market consumption rate has become. Apparently binge watching will be a key influence in how future games are released, suggesting that all episodes for a series will launch at once.

Io Interactive moved from episodic releases in Hitman 2016 to a full standalone release with the sequel. However, now the developer is talking about reverting to that episodic format with Hitman 3. Only time will tell which distribution pipeline proves to be most effective with consumers in the current market climate.