This entire Telltale situation is reminiscent of what happened at Gazillion and Marvel Heroes. A studio that was likely paying massive amounts of for licenses was forced to lay off their employees with little notice. A Thread.
Gazillion employees were given 2 weeks notice they would be laid off. There was no medical insurance, severance, no PTO payout, nothing.
There was a small crew of devs who secretly kept working on packaging up the remaining game assets and tools to be sold. Trion would later acquire these assets.
Gazillion was going bankrupt but they never disclosed that information to their employees until May of THIS YEAR. Gaz employees tried to file a class action lawsuit, go through the department of labor and even the United States Bankruptcy Court.
I filed all the necessary paper work and filled out the correct forms, talked to half a dozen lawyers and we got nothing. I’m owed over $10,000 of unpaid PTO and that’s not even including any type of severance.
Bankruptcy is a complicated legal process. The order of creditors that get paid first are secured (bank/loans), then unsecured, and then finally the employees. Even after the sale of the Gazillion assets the money never made it to the employees.
There was an opportunity that our management/board/ceo could have filed a Chapter 11 instead of Chapter 7, which would have given a better chance the employees get paid out, but that never happened and was never explained to us why. I believe the reason was selfishness.
You can love your job you and what you do, but don’t love your company. They most likely don’t love you. At the end of the day they are a business, they want to make money. If you do feel loved by your company, you are extremely lucky.
I hope all the ex-Telltale employees get what they deserve. PTO, severance, medical insurance etc… They deserve it, they are people.
I just want people to know my experience and how I lost faith in game companies. This isn’t the first occurrence of this type of thing I’ve witnessed personally. THQ, ImaginEngine, Flagship, etc… the list is long. And I’m sure it won’t be the last.
I'm not saying change for the better is impossible but we are a long way off. It's going to take action both from the top down (management) and bottom up (employees).
