Telltale Publishing (the Jackbox Party Pack and possible future titles)
Jennifer
Moderator
It seems that Telltale is going full out publisher now, with a new Telltale Publishing label.
They last published Hector: Badge of Carnage in 2011, but that was apparently actually co-developed by them as Telltale designers Dave Grossman and Mark Darin are credited with design on episodes 2 and 3.
The Jackbox Party Pack appears to be a completely different situation altogether, as The Jackbox Party Pack was already developed and published digitally by Jackbox Games. Telltale is simply handling publishing on disc.
This definitely shows how far Telltale has grown, as even after the success of The Walking Dead, they still had some of their own games published on disc by other publishers. Law & Order: Legacies was published on disc for Windows by Avanquest Software in November 2012, shortly before the release of the final episode of The Walking Dead: Season One.
Comments
Woah! Such a weird genre for them to publish, but hey its nice to see them publishing other products besides their own games.
That's really cool! I wonder how that worked out and came to be behind the scenes, especially as I thought Telltale would only publish adventure games or games from people they worked with.
I agree. As I said in my post below, I figure they would mostly dabble in adventure or story based games.
Although, perhaps there might be more to this. In some recent YouTube interview someone had with Job for Minecraft: Story Mode, Job did hint that Telltale was experimenting with games that could be influenced by "crowd play" like their Live Crowd Plays for Borderlands and Minecraft. Additionally, with Kevin's hints on the Minecraft AMA that they are working on more experimental pilots, maybe part of that meant that they could be working on some pilot title with the people who made those games in the Jackbox Party Pack. Obviously I wouldn't imagine this deal is what came of that, but what I'm getting at is that maybe this deal came as something on the side as a result of them already working together on something else?
If this does indicate Telltale working with Jackbox Games, that could potentially be really cool. A humorous trivia game encompassing all of Telltale's history could be fun. Especially if they blended it with characters licensed from Telltale's games, or related games. Telltale even already has a perfect venue for such a game, as it could be a really fun use for The Inventory.
It's just speculation on my part, but outside of whatever share of money they make from publishing discs, I don't see what else Telltale gets out of this from the outside looking in. With Hector, they sold the series on their store, helped with advertising it, and also helped with the game design as you said.
From the outside looking it, this all seems rather low key so far considering Telltale usually tries to have more involvement or otherwise tries to help out other people by giving an adventure game exposure. This isn't a story game, so there might another reason for reaching out to Telltale to publish their game. That, or I could just be overanalyzing. :P
I wasn't thinking so much Telltale history trivia, but rather Telltale possibly consulting with the people who made those games to create their own experimental story telling pilot game where multiple people can tell a story together or something. If not that, then maybe they could also be consulting together to make some new party game, also acting as a new pilot for Telltale. Again, this is just me spitballing ideas with no indication anything deeper is going on, but it's just my hunch given that this is otherwise a weird partnership. Jackbox games don't dabble in story telling/adventure/etc like Telltale's other partnerships have.
Telltale is finally announcing their publishing initiative. They have a PR release below, and in the blog post, they also tease that they will announce more games they will be publishing in the future.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/258278/Telltale_Games_Brings_The_Jackbox_Party_Pack_to_RetailersWorldwide.php
Do we have any idea as to Telltale's involvement here? Was it purely a matter of pushing it out to stores, or did they have anything to do with the writing or development in general?
Jackbox Party Pack was already released digitally by Jackbox Games, so it's likely Telltale didn't have any input on the game itself (unless they offered their services in an advisory fashion, while the game was still in development, like they did with Ankh in their early days, but they probably would have announced it if that was the case).
I was previously under the impression that there might have been something underlying about this (kind of like how they published Hector and had input on the game's development), but going by the blog post, I'm going to guess that at this point, Telltale has just gotten big enough to publish other people's games and that there wasn't anything else to it as I initially thought.
Wonder if we'll get any new site avatars for these publishing games?
Going full publisher is great, good on them. They've never had to bow and scrape to the ironclad AAA publishers, being successful on their own. Now they're the best of both words. Keep taking risks and giving 110%, you wonderful, talented people.
Would be cool to see then publish indie games and give other Indy companies a chance.
I definitely not mind them publishing, as long as they keep making great games and none plans change to go more professional direction.
That would definitely be nice. They did publish Hector: Badge of Carnage, by Straandlooper, which was Straandlooper's first game. The Hector team later went onto make Schrödinger's Cat, under the company name Italic Pig. The Straandlooper company/brand itself doesn't seem to exist anymore (their website is gone, and the Straandlooper Facebook and YouTube accounts haven't been used in years.
It would be great to see them do something like they did for Hector with other indie developers (where they help with the development of the game, instead of just publishing it, which seems to be what they're doing with The Jackbox Party Pack). They're big enough now that they could probably manage to do so without putting a dent in the development time of their own projects.