Telltale Games cuts 25 percent of its employees in major restructuring

Telltale Games, the San Francisco-based episodic game developer who has been very busy so far in 2017, is now taking a few steps back. The developer announced today it will be laying off 90 of its employees, which amounts to about 25 percent of its total workforce.

It sounds like Telltale simply got too big in comparison to sales of its titles. In 2017 alone, the developer released second seasons of its episodic games based on Minecraft and Batman, along with the third season of its Walking Dead series, plus a game based on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy comic book. Today’s press announcement stated the layoffs will not affect the development of Telltale’s previously announced projects, but added that in the future it will concentrate on launching fewer games. Telltale’s titles are among the few that are released for Windows, Mac, game consoles and mobile platforms like Android and iOS.

Along with the layoffs, Telltale’s press announcement stated it will also be using “more proven technologies” to develop its games from now on. The developer has been using its own internal game engine and graphics for several years, and the age and features of that engine has fallen well behind other more established tools such as Unreal and Unity. It’s likely Telltale will use one of those established engines for future games.

At the moment, Telltale’s fifth and final episode of Guardians of the Galaxy is expected to launch this week, as well as the fourth of five episodes for Minecraft Story Mode; Season Two. The Batman: Enemy Within game is in the middle of its season and the third season of The Walking Dead was completed earlier this year. Telltale has already announced that the fourth and final season for its Walking Dead series will launch sometime in 2018, as will a second season of The Wolf Among Us, its series based on DC Comics’ Fables comic.