Wednesday, June 27th 2018
Aiming for the Common Denominator: Telltale Games Ditches In-House Engine, Favors Unity
The present is likely a result of Telltale Games' vertiginous rise as a developer of single-player experiences - and their precipitous fall afterwards. As telltale Games has had to restructure its studio team by laying off some 25% of its workforce not that long ago, its seems the company has decided to cut its losses on a tool that arguably made their name and fame: their in-house engine.
Development costs have only gone up as the need for more detailed animations and assets has increased developers' graphics development costs, and Telltale had been working with an engine it had been continually building upon since 2005. however, the fact remains that the engine was showing its age - and gripping its teeth at performance - for the last few games the studio developed. In the end, the studio must have decided that in the face of the reduced workforce, games development and engine engineering were too much at the same time, and naturally decided to cut the latter.For smaller studios, it does make sense, anyway, to license their engine tech instead of having the overhead of engine development and engineering in-house - and there are many cost-effective solutions out there. Unity is one such, and has already shown its capabilities in many games - and experiences (just check out Neil Blomkamp's Oats Studios' videos, for instance.) Here's hoping this move allows Telltale to do what they do best - focus on storytelling and experiences, eventually letting them grow again. Who knows? Eventually they may be able to have a newly-developed in-house engine again.
Source:
Eurogamer
Development costs have only gone up as the need for more detailed animations and assets has increased developers' graphics development costs, and Telltale had been working with an engine it had been continually building upon since 2005. however, the fact remains that the engine was showing its age - and gripping its teeth at performance - for the last few games the studio developed. In the end, the studio must have decided that in the face of the reduced workforce, games development and engine engineering were too much at the same time, and naturally decided to cut the latter.For smaller studios, it does make sense, anyway, to license their engine tech instead of having the overhead of engine development and engineering in-house - and there are many cost-effective solutions out there. Unity is one such, and has already shown its capabilities in many games - and experiences (just check out Neil Blomkamp's Oats Studios' videos, for instance.) Here's hoping this move allows Telltale to do what they do best - focus on storytelling and experiences, eventually letting them grow again. Who knows? Eventually they may be able to have a newly-developed in-house engine again.
15 Comments on Aiming for the Common Denominator: Telltale Games Ditches In-House Engine, Favors Unity
Almost sounds like a commercial...:respect:
Well at telltale games, graphics is the only thing they do well, not much else.:shadedshu:
Looking forward to more from Telltale with the new engine.
Now, instead of paying some people money to work on the engine, they're going to have to pay Unity for licensing fees which add up to a lot of money, very fast.
I think Telltale made a huge mistake. Their financial situation is going to get worse. Bethesda would benefit a lot more from a new engine than Telltale would. Telltale games are fundamentally simple (next to no chaos allowed). Bethseda's are not (lots of chaos). Bethesda needs an engine that will check for domino effect of assets (e.g. kill this civilian, how many quests are now incompletable?). Most of Bethesda's problems are in scripting.
While Unity isn't really suited for what most of us think of as proper games, you could argue that story-driven games like the ones TTG makes, which are often more interactive movies than games, may be one of very few types of games that can work in Unity. TTG relies on a toolchain create their story driven games, and that need will not change when moving to Unity, and they will have to redesign it to interact with Unity instead. The reason for switching to Unity is cutting development cost, and I don't think this move will do that at all, as more time will be spent on tinkering with a "black box" to make it behave, rather than an engine designed in-house for their purpose.
But the larger problem for TTG isn't really the development cost of having their own game engine, it's bureaucratic overhead. Many of these start out as pretty lean companies and delivers some respectable products, then they get some success and they start to grow, the expansion gets out of control and they keep throwing resources at the ever-declining productivity and quality. Sooner or later the development costs surpasses the revenue and the company initiates a series of impulsive changes in management and restructuring, cutting staff and departments pretty randomly, and cutting development and innovation in favor of "playing it safe" by recycling the same old stuff. By this stage the company have long forgotten the cause of their initial success, and is deep within a death spiral. And this problem is not related to the game industry at all, it's a trap any kind of company can fall into.