A cautionary Telltale on pre-ordering

Late last week, adventure gaming gurus Telltale Games announced they would be closing their doors for good. The company had been facing financial difficulties for some time, though it seems like they’ve finally reached the end of the road. Most of the company’s 200+ staff have been laid off, with only a few remaining to wrap up a contract project for Netflix.

There’s really not a whole lot to say on the closure other than it wasn’t a huge surprise to anybody who’s paying attention.

A lot has changed since Telltale opened its doors in 2004. They formed from the ashes of LucasArts adventure division, in a world where there was demand for such games, but no supply. Today you have indie developers churning out the same quality of work, but operating under much leaner business models. Meanwhile, Telltale was still flooding the market with the same, tired formula, long after it stopped being commercially successful. 

The studio is now officially dead, but it’s left a lot of questions hanging. Telltale’s games still have a loyal fanbase, and many had pre-ordered upcoming seasons of their episodic content. Most notably the series finale for cult classic The Walking Dead. Now that all work on the project has been scraped, it’s left a lot of those customers holding the bag.

According to unconfirmed reports on Reddit, those who have tried to refund their pre-orders are seeing their requests denied by major digital retailers. 

While it’s easy to point fingers at Steam and others for doing this, they’re in a bit of a lurch as well. Telltale may simply not have the cash on hand to honour these refunds, which would mean stores are left covering it out of their own pockets. They’ll likely be taking a wait and see approach to make sure they can legally access what’s owed to them. Only then will refunds be issued.

For its part, Telltale has said they are shopping out The Walking Dead to other studios to complete the season. Though everything is still up in the air at this point. Netflix is also reportedly looking for someone to finish up Telltale’s anticipated Stranger Things adaptation.

This whole mess brings us right back to why pre-orders are always a bad idea.

When you pre-order something, you’re paying a company up front based on a promise to deliver a product at some point in the future. You may get exactly what you wanted, or you may not. Often, there’s very little recourse in the case of the latter. Especially in this particular instance where the company may not even be able to refund your money, forcing you to either swallow the loss or pursue legal action. While there certainly are cases where such a big gamble can be advantageous, video games aren’t one of them.