The Walking Dead: The Final Season Officially Resumes Development

As fans of Telltale’s The Walking Dead series know, development of The Final Season has been on hiatus as the rights of the games were transferred to Skybound following Telltale’s collapse. For those not currently up to date on the situation, here’s a brief summary: In late September, Telltale Games performed a “majority studio closure” that resulted in the company laying off more than 250 employees, keeping a skeleton crew of about 25 on board to finish up contractual obligations to the company’s partners. The company was in the middle of developing the final season of their popular The Walking Dead series at the time, with the second episode premiering as planned a few days after the majority studio closure. The fate of the rest of the season, however, was unknown. A couple of weeks later, it was revealed that Robert Kirkman’s company Skybound would be negotiating for the rights to be able to finish development of the game, while hiring former Telltale employees to finish the work they had started.

Due to a lot of legal and logistical hurdles to jump over, such as acquiring the rights from what’s left of Telltale, hiring many former Telltale employees, finding them a place to work that wouldn’t be too inconvenient for them, etc., The Final Season has been delayed from its original release schedule, which had the third episode set to premiere on November 6 and the finale to premiere on December 18. However, today (November 19), we finally got some more good news. Skybound has announced that development of The Walking Dead: The Final Season has officially started back up today with “many of the talented, passionate team members who originally worked on the game.” The announcement also states that new release dates for the two remaining episodes will be announced soon.

As Telltale has begun to liquidate, their Walking Dead games have started to disappear from some digital retailers, such as Steam. In this new announcement from Skybound, it is also stated that they will get these games back up and available to purchase again as soon as they can. It was also reiterated that those who have already purchased The Final Season will not need to buy the game again and will be able to download the new episodes as they come out.