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shikamaru317 on 06 October 2023
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Barozi said:
shikamaru317 said:

I would assume most of the layoffs were from the team that made their The Expanse game, which just released it's 5th and final episode in late September. Wouldn't make much sense to layoff a significant number of devs from the Wolf Among Us 2 team when the game is still under active development. Guess they plan to only develop 1 game at a time moving forward. 

Not a bad decision considering how their games used to flood the market.

Still, The Expanse seems to have flopped hard commercially (I bought it so don't blame me).

Yeah, I don't really think The Expanse was a popular enough IP to carry a Telltale game. If you look at the IP that the old pre-collapse Telltale made deals for, they were nearly all pretty popular IP, The Walking Dead, Back to The Future, Jurassic Park, Batman, Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Guardians of the Galaxy, Stranger Things (though that one got cancelled when old Telltale collapsed). Pretty much the only small IP they did was Wolf Among Us, based on the relatively niche DC Vertigo comic series Fables, and I think it was mainly a success because Telltale themselves were riding high on success from Walking Dead season 1 winning GOTY and such.

The Expanse by comparison started as a SyFy Channel original, SyFy of course being a paid cable/satellite network, so Nielsen Analytics put it's average viewership those first 3 seasons at about 650,000 people. SyFy ultimately cancelled the series after the 3rd season due to the low ratings. Amazon picked it up after that, and while views were obviously higher on Amazon, it wasn't really huge on Amazon either, compared to the originals some of the other streaming giants were releasing at the time. While Amazon never released official streaming numbers for The Expanse like Netflix and Disney+ often do for their originals, I get the impression that viewers probably only went up from about 650k the first 3 seasons on SyFy, to maybe 5m at most on Amazon. That is just not enough fans of The Expanse to be the revived Telltale's first game as a studio, I really think they would have been better off saving it for after Wolf Among Us 2 released and hopefully proved that Telltale was properly back and as good as they ever were.