Selected games from Telltale. Victims of digital distribution
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Founded in 2004 by former LucasArts employees, Telltale Games had two specialties from the beginning – adventure games (which they used to establish a new distribution model based on episodes) and... digital poker. Over the years, the team fared moderately well, until it broke the bank in 2013 with the phenomenal first season of The Walking Dead. The simplification of the adventure format and the focus on narrative rather than puzzles and moral decisions resulted in great financial success and many game of the year awards.
The company has fell victim to its own success. It grew significantly and began spitting out identical games, just based on different franchises – Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Minecraft, even Game of Thrones. In 2018, the clay legs of the colossus finally broke.
The fall was spectacular, and as a result, most of Telltale's games became unavailable in online stores. Some of the titles have been released physically, and there are still ways to get and play games like Back to the Future, Game of Thrones, Tales from the Borderlands, or the first season of Minecraft Story Mode. At some point, however, the company began to use an unusual distribution model, and boxed releases only contained the first episode of the entire season, whereas the rest had to be downloaded anyway. After the collapse of the company, access to the rest of the content was blocked, and as a result, physical disks no longer offer anything more than single episodes of the entire season.
In 2019, some of the employees and assets of the bankrupt company were bought out by LCG Entertainment, which renamed itself Telltale Games and continues the business model, bringing back the old games to digital distribution – the entire series of The Walking Dead, two seasons of Batman and The Wolf Among Us. Many old games, however, remain unattainable for those who didn't get to buy them in the heyday of TWD – including Guardians of the Galaxy, the second season of Minecraft Story Mode, Jurassic Park, Tales of Monkey Island and great poker simulators using characters from other games – Poker Night at the Inventory and Poker Night 2.
