Last week, Telltale Games announced a “majority studio closure,” which resulted in the firing of 250 employees, leaving only 25 people left in the studio “to fulfill the company’s obligations to its board and partners.” At the time, Telltale did not officially cancel any of the projects that they had been working on, which include the rest of The Walking Dead: The Final Season, which premiered last month, as well as The Wolf Among Us: Season Two, a Stranger Things game, an original IP, and a Minecraft: Story Mode project with Netflix. However, with only 25 employees left running the company, it seemed likely that most of these games were likely to be cancelled.
Fans of Telltale’s biggest series, The Walking Dead, were given just a little bit of assurance today (September 24), after Telltale made a new announcement regarding the future of The Final Season. The announcement states that there are “multiple potential partners” who have expressed interest in assisting Telltale finish development of the last two episodes of The Final Season, and that episode 2 will release tomorrow, September 25, as scheduled. However, the company was sure to mention that they can’t make any promises for certain, so it may be too early for fans to get their hopes up. Furthermore, it has not been stated who these potential partners are. Also, the specific wording that Telltale uses, namely that they want to release the third and fourth episodes “in some form,” has gotten some fans a bit worried. The announcement ends by stating that more answers to this mysterious situation will be coming soon.
Theoretically, if the third and fourth episodes of The Walking Dead: The Final Season are completed, then they will likely include a lot of work done by now-former Telltale employees, including writing, assets, etc. Though the possibility of the season being completed alone has made many fans happy, there are also several fans, including God of War director Cory Barlog, who have suggested if that Telltale as a company is in a stable enough position to finish work on the game, they should first prioritize paying severance to the 250 employees that were recently fired, since they did not receive severance at the time of their firing. Barlog and others have stated that they are fine waiting longer for the final episodes of The Walking Dead if it means that ex-Telltale employees get the severance they deserve.
