Telltale’s new CEO, Pete Hawley, started two months ago, then oversaw layoffs of 25 percent of the company’s employees. While that’s not a good look, it is part of Hawley’s plan to refocus the studio to create higher quality games and branch out in new directions. While that sounds like a solid strategy, a recent interview suggests Hawley might be a bit confused about how he’s going to do that.
Speaking with VentureBeat, Hawley laid out where he is steering the company, and what the 2018 and 2019 release schedules will look like. Without diving into too many specifics, Hawley said the goal was to create fewer games, but make sure the ones getting made are of a higher quality than ever before.
“One of the challenges over the last few years, as the company doubled in size and the amount of product going out increased exponentially — we just took our eye off the ball on innovation and quality,” Hawley told VentureBeat. “Before I took the job, the first thing I did was go on forums and app stores and try to get an idea of the voice of our players. It was clear that our games had become fairly predictable. The formula is loved, but it’s getting old. It’s time for us to innovate, get back to our roots, and do a much better job with fewer games.”
2017 saw the release of 17 episodes of games across all of Telltale’s offerings. For 2018, Hawley says the company will only release three games. Based on what Hawley said, and previous announcements, those three games will be The Walking Dead Season 4, The Wolf Among Us Season 2 and a new IP for the end of the year that Hawley didn’t want to announce just yet. Add in the rest of the Batman: The Enemy Within chapters, and… wait. That’s still around the same amount of gaming as last year.
Hawley also stressed that Telltale works best with smaller IPs, but his explanation is strange. “If you look at Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead, that’s some of what we’re going to get back to. That’s when Telltale is at its best, when we have real control and agency for the player and over the characters in the stories we tell,” he said. “If you work with larger IP, you’re often very restricted. You have 50 or 60 years of expectations as far as who and what that is. We’ve been at our best when we hand control over to the player as far as the story and the destiny of the characters around it, the life and death choices they’re asked to make.”
His comments here raise two key issues. First, it feels like the franchise that has made the biggest reinvention through Telltale is Batman, which probably has the longest lineage of any franchise Telltale has worked with in the past. Hawley even recognizes Batman’s critical success in the interview. It is possible he’s referring to Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy or something else. On the flip side, while The Walking Dead is amazing, it’s still a somewhat traditional zombie story that isn’t too far removed from what you’d get in the comics.
Second, Telltale’s games have never had “real control and agency for the player.” If anything, they have more now than they did in the past. I’ve joked the biggest difference in The Walking Dead Season 1’s ending you can control is if Lee has both arms or not. I’m not sure what Hawley is trying to say with these points, but it feels off.
Additionally, don’t expect many more kid-friendly games like Minecraft. Telltale’s aim is to reconnect with mature gamers, so you know the word “gritty” was thrown around. “I think we’re best when we get back to the grittier, deeper, darker side with some of the IP we’ve worked with, and when we’re given real freedom of choice,” said Hawley. “We’re not playing in worlds or with characters that have very specific sets of rules and ideals and approval processes around them. We have more freedom when we take our own path.”
Again, Telltale’s Batman series suggests the developer was given freedom, since they reinvented many of the characters and even created a unique supervillain. Maybe the other IPs like Guardians of the Galaxy are more strict, but hearing these quotes makes me scratch my head.
To recap, Hawley wants to make fewer games in 2018, despite planned releases actually numbering around the same amount of content as 2017. He wants the 2018 games to be higher quality with fewer bugs and glitches, but released 25 percent of the staff. He wants to go back to the glory days of The Walking Dead Season 1, even though recent games seem more advanced than they did back then. He wants to innovate gameplay experiences, but won’t yet because fans don’t want Telltale to change.
Huh?
So what do you think? Are you as confused as I am by Hawley’s statements? Are you interested in seeing what’s next for Telltale? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
