In what continues to be a horrific year for the people who make video games, layoffs have been announced at the newly revamped Telltale Games. Whether "some" of the team or "most" employees have been affected remains unclear at the time of writing.
Word began to circulate after former Telltale cinematic artist Jonah Huang (who has worked for both iterations of the studio) took to Twitter, alleging that Telltale had "laid most of us off early September". An NDA (non-disclosure agreement) restricted their commenting on the status of the currently in-development The Wolf Among Us 2, but you can read through Huang's entire thread for further context.
The final episode of The Expanse: A Telltale Series was only recently released on 21st September, and to hear that layoffs had already happened by that point is a bit of a gut punch. We were playing through it for review around the same time and quite liked this first effort (7/10), going on to wax poetic about how bright the future seemed for the studio before being proven naive fools mere days later.
A statement was obtained by Geoff Keighley, producer/presenter of the Game Awards, and posted to Twitter, providing further clarification. The statement in full reads:
"Due to current market conditions, we regrettably had to let some of our Telltale team go recently. We did not take this action lightly, and our commitment to storytelling and finding new ways to do so remains the same. We are grateful to everyone for their dedication along this journey, and we are working to support everyone impacted. All projects currently in development are still in production, and we have no further updates at this time."