In the matter of 3 days, nearly two decades of games are gone...

So for those that haven't heard, yesterday we lost another great studio to reasons, most of us aren't still sure of. Telltale games officially, or in some ways, unofficially shut their doors for the last time yesterday morning as staff were sent home early. I was going to say something much more after I got home from dinner, but more and more stories kept coming out about the shutdown, and like an Ubisoft game release, we were left with many confusing variations of the same story. Now that the dust has settled 24 hours later, this is what has been said so far. The first report was that the studio was closing down, but 25 people were going to stay on to finish out TWD: Final Season, while games like The Wolf Among Us 2 and Stranger Things, and the second season of Game Of Thrones were cancelled, effective immediately. However, as the day, and eventually night went on, it turned out that wasn't even the case. The 25 staff members who were kept on as a skeleton crew from the original 250, were going to help finish the 5 part series of Minecraft Story Mode. So what went wrong? Well, there are a lot of guesses, but not many actual answers. Even the staff of the studio were shocked and appalled at the sudden firing. 225 people were cut loose, without even severance pay, in the blink of an eye, and no one seems to know really why. Sales are mentioned by the CEO, but how far off were they, no one really knows. One guess is that they had just too many projects, and too few hits anymore hence the "low sales". Of course there was tons of stories through 2014-2017 of mismanagement up and down the court. A major restructuring was under way at the end of 2017 when 90 jobs were just cut overnight. Still, it obviously didn't help, as in the letter out to people, CEO Pete Hawley said

“It’s been an incredibly difficult year for Telltale as we worked to set the company on a new course. Unfortunately, we ran out of time trying to get there. We released some of our best content this year and received a tremendous amount of positive feedback, but ultimately, that did not translate to sales. With a heavy heart, we watch our friends leave today to spread our brand of storytelling across the games industry.”

Either way, my heart goes out to those who were swept up in it all. The games industry reached out, and many studios offered up positions and job opportunities for those affected by this, using a hashtag on Twitter. Hopefully each and every one of those talented individuals gets a new job quickly.

But another studio that closed down, very silently too, was Capcom Vancouver who just on Tuesday, was closed down as well. The studio mainly focused on the Dead Rising games for Microsoft's line up. Apparently Capcom Japan came in for a review of the upcoming games, and was apparently so pissed/distraught that they shut down the studio, and moved everything worth value to them, back to their headquarters in Japan, while canceling other projects. The estimated worth according to sources, was about 4.5 billion dollars. So to eat that kind of cost makes you wonder what they saw in there.

Both studios were opened in the mid 2000's, Telltale in 2004 and Capcom Vancouver in 2005 as Blue Castle Studios, both now gone for good. Two decades between the two. Say what you want about some of the content that came out of both studios, most of what did come forth was good content. The Walking Dead season one and The Wolf Among Us was some of the best content that Telltale has ever made, and it was top tier stuff. Same to be said about CV with Dead Rising 1 and 2. As I said earlier, my heart goes out to the Capcom Vancouver ladies and gents, and I hope you all find new jobs as quick as possible.