Telltale Games is Closing Down – Final Season of ‘The Walking Dead’ Cancelled

If you pay attention to the gaming industry at all then you’ll know it’s one of the more volatile fields to work in.  The landscape of the industry seems to be in constant flux as new studios pop up and old ones shutter.  It seems like every other week you hear about massive layoffs at a studio that, otherwise, seemed to be doing fine.  Well, sadly, this weeks brings news of another closure.

Telltale Games has officially announced that they are closing down.  For horror fans, the studio might be best known for its fantastic “Walking Dead” game series.  Beyond that the studio worked on such properties as “Batman”, “Guardians of the Galaxy”, “The Wolf Among Us”, “Game of Thrones”, and “Borderlands.” Unfortunately, whether it was mismanagement or poor sales, those hot properties didn’t translate into financial gains for the company and the studio has now laid off about 250 employees according to The Verge.  Since the news started spreading yesterday morning, Telltale CEO Pete Hawley has officially released a statement regarding the closure:

A short statement. @telltalegames pic.twitter.com/8Pm22nlCYy

— Pete Hawley (@petehawley) September 21, 2018

So what does that mean for the future of Telltale? The studio was known for having a lot of pots on the stove, so there were a number of projects in the pipeline line like a second season of “The Wolf Among Us” and a game based on “Stranger Things.”  Unfortunately, these projects have been since cancelled.

It was early believed that the 25 remaining people would continue to work on the current final season of “The Walking Dead” which is about to release its second episode next week.  Sadly, this is not the case as US Gamer is reporting that the remaining individuals are there to fill an obligation to Netflix to bring Minecraft to their service.  As of now, it appears that the final season of “The Walking Dead” has been cancelled and we will not see how this story concludes.  For those of us that been Clementine fans since the beginning this is especially disappointing news.  As of right now there’s no word on any services offering refunds in the wake of the cancellation, so if you bought your season pass ahead of time you may want to call around to see what people are doing.

But while we may be out 20 bucks, the bigger tragedy here is the loss of jobs.  Thankfully, companies near the studio are taking to Twitter to announce job openings.  However, those affected by the layoffs are reporting that they have not received any severance packages and there’s word that some may not be eligible for unemployment as they were considered 1099 employees.  It’s certainly a scary time for them and I wish them all the luck in the world.  And thank-you for creating one of the most emotional zombie experiences I’ve ever had.