Inner Workings of Telltale.
Just some of the main quotes from Glassdoor since a lot of people don't know it exists. I liked this company a lot so it saddens me to read this. Let me add that I didn't post this only to be bitter for no good reason, but because I have been following this franchise and company for years on end. Noticing the quality drop and finally getting a more "behind the scenes" reasons really sheds some light on everything. Hopefully lots of the issues listed below get fixed. If they don't, the future may not be too bright for this game and company overall.
"Often decisions that are dictated early in production are reversed later in production, requiring people to redo work constantly. This is not "iteration" - it is clear that the execs don't understand how to make the games better."
"Learn how to set up an episode before rolling any part of the team onto the project, including art and animation teams."
"After 2 years of releasing the same type of game, the company still doesn't know how to properly schedule an episode"
"The company has stagnated in terms of its product and is dedicated to churning out the same thing episode after episode"
"I'll often be given two weeks on a task, but be required to switch to a different, equal task after the first week, with the expectation that I'll simply crunch to make up for the fact that my schedule keeps changing. it is incredibly rare for me to have any sort of solid idea about what task I will be assigned more than 4-5 days in advance, meaning that I can never budget my time or plan my effort. This ends with everything being a Rush job, with cut corners, and tons of crunch."
For the folks who still think the 5 games at once is fine because they have different teams, this is for you:
"The basic way tasks get done here, given the schedule, is that person A will have an Idea, they will then give a rough description of that idea to Person B, who will work on the task for a few days. Then the schedule will get messed up, and person B will be moved away, and the task will fall to Person C, who will have no explanation of what is happening. Person C will then finish the task as best he can, and the task will go up for a Review. The people in the Review will dislike how the Task turned out, and be confused as to why Person C got it so wrong. Instead of telling person C what went wrong, The task will then be removed and given to person D. The end result is, as a developer, I have no sense of ownership or vision for the work that I am doing . I was not there at the start, I won't be there at the end, and 99% of the time any creative input I bring to the table will be either rejected outright, or lost due to churn."
"Telltale likes to do things the Telltale way. They think that they invented storytelling. If you have previous experience from another game studio, Keep it to yourself. When people ask "why are these workflows so bad?" and "why are these schedules so messed up" management simply gets frustrated and tells you "things are different here"."
"The Tool is one of the worst pieces of software ever created by man."
"One of my testers had a death in the family, he was told "you can mourn after we get Walking Dead out"."
"Any time a game was shipping, 9pm-midnight days were standard for the week leading into it, and a game was shipping once or twice a month while I was there."
"There's a lot of jerking from one project to another that was going on when I left. It seemed like the focus was on throwing projects at the wall to see what stuck"
"Also, production schedules mean the studio is in a state of constant crunch. There's questionable transparency"
"The pace does not allow for quality and the end product is often riddled with bugs. Hard to be proud of end product regardless of perceived early critic reviews."
Comments
I really hope this thread does not get deleted. It has my full support as well.
As a company, and as a group of self proclaimed "tolerant" people, who SHOULD value the constructive criticism of their fan base, any obstruction of these reviews and comments deemed "negative" (by Telltale) is outright blasphemous- and a deliberate attempt at censoring people, a denial of our free speech.
I feel sorry for Telltale. They are too pretentious and stubborn to change their ways; and this will eventually cause their downfall as a game studio. I sincerely hope they fix themselves, and revert to the great studio they were in the past.
Honestly, I don't even know what to say, I always knew TellTale management was a mess, but this is just 10 times the amount of mess I thought they had.
A shame really, I want to hope one day they will change, but based on this, it isn't gonna happen.
I wonder if they were always like this or they changed recently because of whatever reason. Like if they were like this during games like The Walking Dead Seasons 1 and 2, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales From The Borderlands. That's something I want to know
The culture of this company just seems so terrible. They treat their workers terribly, and spread theselves so thin. They are brining in freelance writers and other crew just to keep up. I know I can give the company a ton of shit from time to time. But I honestly I pity the people who just want to make a good game and get shafted by poor managment.
Reading these reviews of company I once thought would set the standard for storytelling in video games kept reminding me of a line from a poem "things fall apart, the center can not hold".
I rage over the quality drop, but I weep for what could have been.
I have no words
I agree with everything said here but for this company to reinvent itself It needs years.... They just can't do all of this on the walking deads time....and maybe an indie company can't continue forever for luck reasons.By the time this company will be at its prime again a lot of fans will be out becuase these kind of flops can always test the customer's patience...
Telltale's general cavalier attitude and above incidents (if true) are supported by Job Stauffer's (who is head of creative communications) comment of "Just deal with it" when he finally turned up after repeatedly dodging the AMA on this site but yet constantly updated his twitter feed with his testimonials of losing weight advertising another company's VR headset.
I like (adore more like) The Wolf Among Us, tolerate The Walking Dead, despise Telltale. I have great sympathy for the employees, but I am extremely disgusted with how the higher ups are apparently treating the staff who actually keep the company running (stumbling more like).
I worked for EB Games (Australia's Gamestop named locally) and can absolutely attest to how people involved with the entertainment industry act, and this sounds exactly like the stuff Telltale would do.
Profit over substance, dollar signs over employee's well being.
These lips are definitely not sealed.
Thats shocking wth..
where did u get this info from?
https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Reviews/Telltale-Games-Reviews-E256429.htm
I don't know if Telltale is unaware of these reviews or is just willfully ignorant of them (most likely the latter), but it's clear that something needs to change. I'm hoping with Dan back in the CEO position that something's will change, but I remain skeptical. No wonder people leave in droves at Telltale, they hire people right out of college, they get some experience through working in bad work conditions (impossible deadlines, moving from team to team, forced to work in periods of mourning), and then get picked up from bigger studios with no attempt from Telltale to even keep them. While Telltale is posting pictures and creating threads about their pets to make it look like things are great, it takes one simple look at Glassdoor to see what's really happening over there behind the scenes, and it's not pretty.
damn, every review pretty much said deadlines and too face paced...
What can we expect with Dan, i think a general rule of thumb with Dan- is slightly longer episodes-no problem there-but hes not sean vanaman either
Employees are treated like shit.
Customers are treated like shit.
When's the day Telltale will be treated like shit?
Ive been aware of these glassdoor reviews for a while but I would never have posted them here even though I wanted to.
The saddest part is these are practically kids straight out of college, they dont know their rights, they dont know this environment isnt normal. I hope it doesnt make young people give up on their dreams of working in the gaming industry because that passion will feed off a sense of achievement that they clearly dont get in that system.
inb4 someone says that these are all fake and writen by Telltale haters or salty employees.
My opinions on their games haven't changed, but after reading the Glassdoor reviews, I think it's pretty easy to assume that Telltale is a really lousy place to work.
Wow. I honestly didn't think it was that bad, we all knew they weren't the most organized company but this:
This is fucked up.
If those are legitimate employees' experiences then I have no words.
These folks need a union.
I'm disgusted and disappointed at the same time. I knew it was bad at Telltale, but I didn't think it was THAT bad.
I'm a professional software developer, though not for Telltale or anyone in the gaming industry.
I also don't put much faith in Glassdoor reviews. Happy workers don't usually write them, and without the employer's viewpoint on any given situation, you don't know the whole story.
That being said, it sounds like they need to fix their schedule to accommodate reality. Reality is that people get sick and have personal situations sometimes that prevent them from working. Reality is that sometimes someone needs to suddenly switch to a different project. That means they have to write stuff down. There should be a written design for a game up front, reviewed by all who have input, and if someone wants to change it mid-flight, that change also needs to be written and reviewed. Having stuff in writing helps when someone is suddenly unavailable for whatever reason, and someone unfamiliar has to come in and take over. Enough should be written that a new person wouldn't be completely lost.
In my experience, it's best to schedule things assuming that an employee can get in 6 hours per day of real work. Real work doesn't include meetings or other administrative stuff. Sure, there will be crunch times, but if every day is crunch time, the staff burns out, and that's devastating for a company dependent on creativity.
It turns out that the people who are affected the worse by Telltale's episodic formula are not the customers who wait three months for each episode but the very employees who develop these episodes and have to deal with tight deadlines, messy schedules, and infighting with management.
I thought that working at Kroger was bad, but this is a whole other level of misery.
Last time someone posted the Glassdoor reviews people said it was fake.
I remember that, and they'd probably still say it's fake, that it's all a conspiracy.
Found more.
"The company is big; the decision-making small. Those same people coming in to bring their best are stymied by process that is frequently driven by the gut feel of a single person"
"The real complaint I'll add to this is that management would often not scope projects, or intentionally over-scope from the beginning."
"The idea of a budget was of no concern to a studio doesn't pay overtime, so people's hours were treated as an endless resource. This was a company wide mentality and at the time I left they were doubling down on it to hit some of the most unreasonable deadlines the studio had proposed yet"
"Telltale is company where there is never enough time or resources to deliver quality content on all fronts. Sacrifices and corners are cut at almost every stage of development resulting in an inferior product compared to most any other major releases."
"The company hemorrhages quality talent to other studios at an incredible rate directly because of management's own ineptitude and callousness, and has almost zero intake of talent aquisition from other studios. Its classic brain drain."
"The proprietary software is horrendous! The sad thing is all the artists and most management know this, it's just one person on top refuses to listen to that argument, so we all have to suffer working with lackluster workflow under extreme deadlines."
"The deadlines are so tight and you're put onto another deadline before you can even think. It's exhausting."
"Deadlines for most others were intense with too much constant change, making things hard to keep up with."
"They'll lie about benefits to get you in the door, because they don't care about keeping people, just hiring more."
"All that greatness is dragged down by a terrible culture, which stems from the ego, insecurity, temper and lack of communication skills at the very top of the org chart. Telltale's culture is all about overworking, backstabbing, undermining and generally seeing employees as expendable cogs."
"The ridiculous production schedules and one or two unfortunately uncaring leaders lead to people getting burnt out"
"Insane production schedules. Over the last few years, the games have ballooned in scope, but the time allotted to make them has remained the same. Management tries to solve this problem by simply throwing more people at the project"
"There is little oversight from executives for most of the development process, but whenever they do look at the game, you can expect to throw out substantial amounts of your work and start over because they changed their minds about something."
"We have no process, no one understands how to schedule anything (or keep to it, or adapt it if we really need to, without forcing your employees to work ridiculous amounts of overtime) and task tracking is a joke. Everything is rushed and last minute. It's inexcusable. I've worked at other game companies in the past and nowhere has it been as bad as it is here."
"Hire new Directors, they are too in the trenches, you need people with Vision."
"Constant crunch. There's no way to have a schedule that matches scope in this place. Everything is changing constantly, goals are consistently shuffling and priorities are never set for more than a few hours."
"Staff is jerked around from project to project with little to no warning."
How legitimate is Glassdoor?
%100
Pretty sure you need a work email to even post on there.
I honestly feel this one is waaay too exaggerated. In the best case scenario, it is a joke. In the worst case scenario, it is pretty damn scary and cruel.
Honestly, in my opinion, if they would just stop being stubborn, actually apologise for their faults and correct their mistakes my respect for TellTale would be alleviated- most of it at least... Every company loses it at some point, but they need to get a hold of themselves and admit to the fact that they're not perfect, take a step back, and actually perfect themselves as opposed to spitting out 3 games at once!
You should become an investigative journalist Don't_Look_Back because I can imagine the title of this thread being printed on the front cover of The New York Times Magazine.
I'm just imagining the faces of the higher ups in the company coming onto the forum and seeing this.
Bet they'll pull a Sean Murray and not even acknowledge it.
Edit:/ For the record, i'm not actually being serious. I'm messing around.
It's kinda funny lol
I honestly think that one is fake. A few of these come off more as either trollish or exaggerated responses( in addition that most of these are anonymous). The ones that seem to be more likely true are redo's of episodes, deadlines, and schedule issues.
Hey, at least the thread hasn't been deleted yet. I was expecting it to be taken down within 30 minutes of being posted.
True.
Probably wise though, since it would reveal it's something they're trying to hide.
Maybe it's not taken down because management probably doesn't read any of the threads. Maybe they're satisfied with the numbers and not even interested in what the consumer has to say or just don't care.
Funny you say that because I just got done writing a 20 page paper for my professor and a 5 page letter to a newspaper editor. Let's just say I wont be writing anything for a long time
To the untrained eye, these look like comments from people who have a chip on their shoulder. Except these are similar comments from numerous former employees who have the same "axe to grind" so to speak with the way production is handled at Telltale. They can't all be wrong can they!?
Surely not!! How heartless if true! Disgusting!
I like your comment. It seems like a majority of the complaints are with the CEO and his direction. With the recent CEO switch (whether temporary or permanent), it seems like a necessary step for TellTale to start fixing some issues to have a better culture by the end of the year. I'm not in the game industry. but from my previous work experiences, it usually takes about a year for staff to adjust to a new higher up or system. People hell bent on the old system leave, those who are flexible adjust, new folk become assimilated under the new direction, and any flaws in the new system are exposed and beginning to be remedied by the time that first year is over.
I agree with your scheduling comment. My current job is a project engineer for a construction company. Our current job is a two year project. Things were planned out long before it start. We had issues since day 1. However, with each potential issue, we have a meeting, see where we are at, what the issue may impact, and come up with a plan to remedy it or work around it until it is resolved. Everything is backed up and a paper trail (either digital or physical) is recorded. I know games are a different dance, but it seems like the art of managing is still the same. How do you feel about this? I really would like to hear the differences and similarity between project managing with your experiences and mine.
It's easy to type a lot on this, and I'm trying not to.
The obvious similarity is that if you plan things up front, and all goes to plan, you spend less than if you just try to wing it and wind up having to do things over. For construction, there are physical supplies that can really cost a lot if you order too many or the wrong kind, and if you order too few, you might have to pay more for a second order and delay the project, which could result in people being idle and possible penalties for late delivery, and the weather might play a factor in some projects. In the software world, the only physical expense is if you need to order computer hardware, and that's less common now than it used to be. However, if you do things wrong, there's a significant people expense at correcting it all, and there's the notion of "technical debt" where you try to code around problems instead of fixing them properly, which makes the project harder to maintain in the future.
People expect that software is easier to change than construction. Sometimes this expectation is a bit extreme. You don't have someone coming a week before completion and saying, "By the way, can we have a swimming pool on the third floor?" I'm hoping the changes Telltale developers complain about aren't of this magnitude, but I really don't know.
I can't say how I would fix Telltale without knowing exactly what their processes are now. In general, you can't go wrong with having reference information to consult later, even if it's something like "Clementine likes apples." Some would think that's a pain and waste of time to put together, but it really helps to have it later.
That is true. It would've done more harm deleting than keeping it.