Bottom 768 — Week 10 — Poll 12

[This Old Neon]

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Saturday... or Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

[liu yuante]

This feels like heresy but I have to give it to S1 of the Walking Dead. One of the most emotionally brutal games I've ever played, it gives zero ***** about how attached you may have gotten to certain characters, and is almost unbearably realistic in its depiction of what probably would actually happen to most of us in a zombie apocalypse. The ending is almost excruciating for the emotional wringer it puts you through, but it's worth it, at least for the experience and appreciation for the amazing job Telltale did with the story and characterizations.

[Kong Wen]

I still think Walking Dead 1 is the best Telltale game I played (bearing in mind I haven't played the werewolf comic book one). Great story, great characters, great set-pieces, doesn't get too bogged down in its storytelling method.

It's a shame the Telltale licences and IPs got gobbled up by a soulless husk corporate 3rd party who wears their skin like a mask to try to sell new games that aren't created by the original developers.

[Sharecrow]

It's a shame the Telltale licences and IPs got gobbled up by a soulless husk corporate 3rd party who wears their skin like a mask to try to sell new games that aren't created by the original developers.

Well, that can happen. It’s a shame their business model wasn’t viable. I’m giving the new co a chance with Expanse later this year. Fwiw, I never played Walking Dead. Tales from the Borderlands was probably my favorite Telltale game that I have played.

[Kong Wen]

It's a shame the Telltale licences and IPs got gobbled up by a soulless husk corporate 3rd party who wears their skin like a mask to try to sell new games that aren't created by the original developers.

Well, that can happen. It’s a shame their business model wasn’t viable. I’m giving the new co a chance with Expanse later this year. Fwiw, I never played Walking Dead. Tales from the Borderlands was probably my favorite Telltale game that I have played.

Yeah, it can and did happen. A company with a non-viable business model created some excellent games, and a company with a probably viable business model will create some crap.

[Sharecrow]

It's a shame the Telltale licences and IPs got gobbled up by a soulless husk corporate 3rd party who wears their skin like a mask to try to sell new games that aren't created by the original developers.

Well, that can happen. It’s a shame their business model wasn’t viable. I’m giving the new co a chance with Expanse later this year. Fwiw, I never played Walking Dead. Tales from the Borderlands was probably my favorite Telltale game that I have played.

Yeah, it can and did happen. A company with a non-viable business model created some excellent games, and a company with a probably viable business model will create some crap.

If they sold more games they wouldn’t have gone bankrupt. The games didn’t resonate enough with players.

[Kong Wen]

If they sold more games they wouldn’t have gone bankrupt. The games didn’t resonate enough with players.

They resonated enough with players.

They didn't resonate enough with enough players.

Now, they will not resonate enough with enough players more cheaply.

[Obviously there's more to it than either of our oversimplifications, otherwise a bigger/more successful company wouldn't need to hide behind a non-resonating company's skin-mask in order to piggyback off those prior games.]

[Sharecrow]

I guess my point is that if they had made better games they’d have been more popular and the company wouldn’t have failed. Not sure what the new company’s odds are given that dynamic. It’s a shame as I was a big fan. But I’m just one buyer.

[liu yuante]

I guess my point is that if they had made better games they’d have been more popular and the company wouldn’t have failed. Not sure what the new company’s odds are given that dynamic. It’s a shame as I was a big fan. But I’m just one buyer.

The relationship between quality and popularity is not 1:1. There are many inputs that determine popularity besides quality of product (advertising and marketing reach for one, without even getting into questions of whether mass appeal correlates with all interpretations of what "quality" is) and there are many inputs that determine financial viability that go beyond quality of product. In Telltale's case, the fact is that they overestimated the amount of work their rapid growth and success could accommodate. In other words, the company grew too quickly and instead of consolidating their existing gains, they started more and more new projects. The crunch felt by developers, followed by executive resignations, restructuring, and loss of investment interest then led to the studio's demise.

TL;DR - they grew too fast for their capabilities. Smaller studios with less mainstream appeal can be highly viable as companies, but they have to have a good sense of which level and portion of the market they occupy, and behave accordingly. Telltale grew in a fashion one would expect of a new major player, when the types of games they produced, while often incredibly good, were never going to occupy the same sales space as AAA blockbusters.