Someone you’ve (probably) never heard of is buying Telltale Games’ IP

Holding company LCG Entertainment wants to start selling - and making - Telltale's games again

The Walking Dead Clementine

Telltale Games closed suddenly in October last year, laying off nearly all of its staff and causing development on nearly all of its games to come to an abrupt end. Now, however, it looks like the defunct studio could be about to make an unexpected return.

In an interview with Polygon, Jamie Ottilie, a representative from a holding company named LCG Entertainment, confirmed that his company had purchased Telltale’s assets. LCG now has rights to licensed properties including Batman and The Wolf Among Us, as well as full rights to Telltale’s original games.

The new company will sell some of Telltale’s former titles, many of which have been difficult to come by since the company’s closure. LCG Entertainment will also be developing new games based on Telltale-related properties, and some new licenses of its own. It will not, however, have the right to develop any new The Walking Dead games, as that license was purchased by Skybound after Telltale’s closure, to ensure that The Final Season would be released as planned.

LCG did not announce the status of some of Telltale’s other licenses, which included Borderlands, Game of Thrones, and Minecraft. Ottilie did confirm that the Stranger Things license that Telltale had been working with before its closure had reverted to Netflix.

Ottilie suggested that his plan was to build on Telltale’s former model: “We’re going to stay small over the next six months and we will work for a distributed development pipeline than Telltale was known for.” Animation and motion capture are likely to be handled externally for now, but the studio’s episodic structure is, for the most part, likely to remain.

“We will probably keep the concept of episodes but with different pacing. This is a different world, from a media consumption standpoint. We need to look at how people like to entertain themselves. I like the idea of binge watching.

More than 250 people were laid off when Telltale closed its doors last year, prompting a class-action lawsuit from former staff. LCG’s purchase of the company will not affect that suit, but Ottilie told Polygon that some workers from the studio will be offered freelance positions in the first instance, with full-time positions a possibility some time in the future.