Robert Kirkman, Creator of The Walking Dead and founder of Skybound Entertainment, announced during a panel at New York Comic Con that his game studio and publisher Skybound Games would be taking on the task of completing the final season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
This news follows the catastrophic closure of Telltale Games which left more than 200 employees jobless without notice or severance pay and only a week left on their healthcare plans. Many condemned this action, and there has been a lot of support online for the former employees. There is even a class action lawsuit filed against the company stating that this violates California’s WARN act.
Robert Kirkman stated that he’s hoping to keep the original team for The Walking Dead together to finish the project at Skybound which is of course great news for them, but it’s very important that we do not forget about everyone else at Telltale who were working on different projects like Stranger Things and The Wolf Among us.
The company made a statement on Twitter that they’re excited to finish Clementine’s story, and that they are going to do right by the fans. This continues the worrying trend in the gaming industry of putting the players before your own workers and while those players do deserve the game they put their money into ALL Telltale workers need to be looked after too, not just those who made their most popular game.
Below you’ll find the statements from the Skybound Games Twitter account where you can see they expertly avoid mentioning the sadness of the layoff and only mention how great and exciting this piece of news is. Let us know what you think about this in the comments below. Should more companies step in to save Telltale’s IP? I personally would love to see what could happen with games like The Wolf Among Us if they were under better management.