Telltale Had Too Many Staff Members For The Types Of Games They Made...
I feel bad for all who lost their jobs but here is a quick comparison (note some of these numbers may be slightly out of date):
Telltale Games - 310 Employees in 2017 and roughly 250 Employees in 2018
Insomniac Games - 275 Employees (Spiderman, Ratchet & Clank, Sunset Overdrive)
Qunatic Dream - 180 Employees (Heavy Rain, Detroit etc)
Rockstar North - 360 Employees (Grand Theft Auto)
Rocksteady Studios - 164 Employees (Batman Arkham Games)
Bethesda Game Studios - 400 Employees (Elder Scrolls, Fallout)
Obsidian Entertainment - 170 Employees (Fallout NV, Pillars Of Eternity)
Playground Games - 200+ Employees (Forza Horizon)
Platinum Games - 211 Employees (Nier Automata, Bayonetta, MGS Rising etc)
Sign in to comment in this discussion.
Comments
Actually most notably too is "Spiders" an Indie studio that makes RPG's with 20 Employees! They've made titles such as The Technomancer, Bound By Flame and are currently working on Greedfall...
True, but it's the episodic nature of the projects AND having too many concurrent projects at a time. If you want to produce a lot of stuff in a really short time, you need a lot of staff.
If you mismanage resources and allow too many "aesthetic" or artistic changes without control, while refusing to deal with core issues (engine, QA) you'll end up using a lot of money just to try to keep the projects alive (and "on time")
Unfortunately Telltale cornered itself into a situation where it was inadvisable to continue to grow, but they had to in order to continue the mad dash of licenses and deals they struck. It is a case of a small company that fell into the growing too fast trap.
Bearing in mind that most of those companies also outsource to other smaller companies to develop certain parts of their game. Not sure if telltale did this.
For a company that makes games that are at best and hour to a hour and a half that is an asinine amount of people working for them and on top of that using a free engine, they're damn Skittles lucky this didn't happen sooner 310 employees. And if not that that super stupid show woulda definitely done them in. Too big for your britches comes to mind. But this still REALLY sucks I was deeply looking forward to twau s2???
On top of that they had absolutely zero OG IPS games just games that costed rediculous amounts of money to obtain properties.
Price point is a big factor too making it harder for them to support the large amount of staff they have considering most of their games are half the price of AAA titles.