Telltale Faced Mass Layoffs in September
It’s been almost two months since over 200 Telltale employees were laid off in September and the future of the developer’s most well-known game IP, The Walking Dead, was called into question. While the fourth & final season of The Walking Dead is planned to continue, the company that started the series is reportedly closing down and being liquidized.
Additionally, several of their games have been reportedly removed from Steam.
Telltale is going through a legal process called “assignment for the benefit of creditors” (or “ABC” for short). Business attorney Terel L. Klein explains: “In layman’s terms, an ‘assignment for the benefit of creditors’ is when a company, usually suffering from financial difficulties, can sell off its assets to pay its creditors. It functions much like a bankruptcy proceeding, except it is based upon state law.”
The business advisory firm that’s handling this process for Telltale is called Sherwood Partners and the firm’s co-founder, Martin Pitchinson, described the whole situation as “sad”. “It’s just that someone doesn’t make it to the finish line,” Pitchinson told GameDaily.biz recently. “Is it sad? Yes. It’s a whole new world.”
Also, a former Telltale Games employee told GameDaily.biz that COBRA, a federally-mandated insurance program for laid off employees, will end for the Telltale employees laid off in September on November 30th. For a large company like Telltale, COBRA was supposed to last for at least the next 18 months for those eligible former employees but this ABC process appears to have expedited the end of this insurance for them.
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