Telltale Games, the studio behind a resurgence of point and click adventure games with licenses like “The Walking Dead”, “Guardians of the Galaxy”, “Minecraft”, and “Batman” tweeted a letter on Sept. 21, to their fans. Unlike the tweets posted earlier in the day, which contained amusing gifs and news on their latest project, this was far more foreboding. They announced to the world that Telltale would be shutting down with a majority studio closure. There are 25 people who would remain to finish a project for Netflix, and over the course of a few weeks, even those people would be fired.
A closure is not uncommon in the gaming industry. Games are an expensive industry and not every release can make Mario or Zelda money. However, this closure came as quite a shock for a number of reasons one being that Telltale was in the middle of releasing the final “season” of their “Walking Dead” game, where they release one of five parts every few weeks. They also had been working with such high profiles as Netflix, Marvel and DC, with a “Stranger Things” game next on the list. Ultimately, they had never given anyone a reason to suspect any financial difficulties, not even their employees.
According to The Verge, employees were given just 30 minutes notice before having to leave the building. They were given 30 minutes notice that they were fired. As Emily Grace Buck, former narrative designer for Telltale described on Twitter, employees couldn’t even return to get anything they may have left during their last 30 minutes until Sept. 24.
Now, the studio is being faced with a class action lawsuit for letting employees go “without cause” and without “advanced written notice,” both of which are in violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), which requires benefits and at least a 60 day notice for firings from workplaces of 100 or more employees. As Buck stated in a series of tweets detailing her experiences leaving the studio “Around 250 people are jobless, not 225, we did not get any kind of severance, our healthcare only lasts for one more week, many former employees were contract & can't get unemployment.”
This isn’t even getting into the longstanding accusations of unpaid overtime and overworking that have come out against the studio, as well as the executive and financial troubles that seem to have gone on right under fans noses for quite some time.
There’s only so much that can be said about Telltale’s closure at this time. It’s only been about a month since it happened, and there's been an outcry that executives would continue to try to find someone to finish “The Walking Dead"'s final season, instead of working to pay severance. Skybound Entertainment, a studio founded in part by Robert Kirkman, the creator of “The Walking Dead” comics, announced that they would work with former Telltale employees to finish “The Final Season”’s last two episodes.
Why talk about this now? It’s been a month and no major developments have been made for a few weeks. Well because, despite the recent outcry related to employee treatment and overworking thanks to the Telltale closing, on Oct. 14, Dan Houser spoke to Vulture. The head of Rockstar Games, the studio responsible for “Red Dead Redemption” and the “Grand Theft Auto” series, spoke on the subject of the long-awaited “Red Dead Redemption 2”, out on Oct 26.
“We were working 100-hour weeks,” said Houser in regard to employment throughout 2018.
Now, while clarifications have been made since, with Houser later saying in an email to Kotaku that this only extended to his four-man writing team and that they only worked over 100 hours a week for about four weeks. To help bolster this claim, Rockstar lifted their social media ban to allow employees to talk about their experiences at the company.
It’s notable that most of the tweets from people still at the company state that, while they’ve had to work overtime, it’s been nowhere near as bad as 100 hour weeks. An Online Tools Programmer at Rockstar’s San Diego office, Vivianne Langdon tweeted “have only been asked to work on weekends once or twice in my entire time at (Rockstar)” and “The few instances when I work late overtime hours are generally because I'm in the ‘zone’…It is not the result of anyone forcing me to stay late or giving me impossible deadlines, but rather my own drive.”
Other employees, like Phil Beveridge, a senior code content designer, stated that while crunch time still exists, it has “definitely improved. Crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 has definitely been a lot better than it was on GTA V.”
Other employees who have left the company were harsher in their descriptions. Job J. Stauffer, the co-founder of Orpheus Self-Care Entertainment who left Rockstar in 2009 said: “I can assure you that during the GTA IV era, it was like working with a gun to your head 7 days a week.”
That’s not to say that Rockstar can’t afford to delay their games or pay their employees overtime. Since its release in 2012, “Grand Theft Auto 5” literally has not left the NPD’s top 20 best selling games month by month list, and is the fastest selling piece of entertainment in history, making $1 billion in just three days. So they can clearly afford another delay or a pay increase.
But the question remains: why? Why force these things on employees? Sure, Rockstar doesn’t technically force anyone to do overtime, but Jennifer Kolbe, head of publishing, told Kotaku “a very long time ago, we decided that if you didn’t actually finish the game, then you wouldn’t be in the credits.” Meaning that if you’ve worked on the game in its entirety, but leave a month before release, chances are your name won’t be listed in the credits.
Unfortunately, even with the outcry surrounding Rockstar and Telltale, the chances of it actually changing much are slim. “Red Dead Redemption 2” is projected by some analysts to sell upwards of 15 million copies. And that’s likely due to the fact that, despite the controversy, it's supposed to be a phenomenal game, receiving perfect scores from publications like The Guardian, Telegraph, Game Informer, IGN, and Easy Allies.
This isn’t even uncommon in the gaming industry. Companies like Naughty Dog, creators of “Uncharted”, and CD Projekt Red, creator of “The Witcher” and the hotly anticipated “Cyberpunk 2077" are all guilty of major crunch time. For an industry that creates worlds that contain dozens, if not hundreds of hours of content, it's almost inevitable. While sales numbers may not be affected, developers are starting to speak out more and more after Telltale and Rockstar’s controversies. Nothing may change now, but the gaming public will remember that.
Arthur Morgan, the lead character of Red Dead Redemption 2, riding a horse through the Western frontier.
The various different games developed by Telltale, such as "The Walking Dead," "The Wolf Among Us," "Tales from the Borderlands," and "Minecraft: Story Mode."
Clementine (Right) and AJ (Left) the main characters of "The Walking Dead: The Final Season."
The logo for Telltale Games.
The logo for Rockstar Games, specifically their New York City branch.
