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Update:
With the future of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead still uncertain even after unnamed "potential partners" emerged offering to help finish it, the game's final season has been pulled from digital stores. A statement on its GOG page says "Telltale has requested a temporary pause of sales of The Walking Dead - Final Season." Meanwhile, its Steam page simply lists a free demo. The takedown comes just one day after the release of the Final Season's second episode, which released on the same day a former Telltale employee filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for allegedly breaking labor laws.
Original story:
On Friday, Telltale Games sadly announced that it had laid off the majority of its staff and was effectively shutting down, with all future projects cancelled aside from the studio's plans to release Minecraft: Story Mode on Netflix, which its remaining skeleton crew of just 25 employees are still working on.
Not only does this mean that both The Wolf Among Us: Season 2 and Telltale's Stranger Things game are as good as dead, but the studio's ongoing episodic release schedule for The Walking Dead: The Final Season has been brought to an abrupt halt, with the assumption being that the recently released second episode was to be the series' last, despite two more having been planned for launch in the coming weeks.
Given that The Final Season, as the name suggests, was intended to be a send-off to Clementine, the fan favourite character that first appeared in The Walking Dead game that put Telltale on the map in 2012, the studio's sudden shuttering leaves the series in a state of fictional limbo, unable to end in the way that its creators had planned. However, Telltale has since released a statement with an update on The Walking Dead: The Final Season's future, and it's a slightly more positive one for those interested in playing out Clementine's story to the very end.
You can read the entire statement in the tweet below, but the main takeaway is that the studio hasn't cancelled The Final Season outright just yet, following support from unnamed "potential partners" who have volunteered to finish and release episodes 3 and 4 "in some form."
pic.twitter.com/Mw97tRsGGYSeptember 24, 2018
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that, following years of crunch and hard work, more than 250 former employees were let go without severance pay last week, and questions are already being asked about who would profit from the sale of these final episodes.
This has led many to publicly call out Telltale for prioritising its games before its own recently laid off staff, which throws yet more doubt into the possibility of The Walking Dead: The Final Season being released in its entirety without further disruption. Speaking of which, leaked footage surfaced over the weekend of Telltale's in the works Stranger Things game, which is probably as close as we'll ever get to playing what could have been a real comeback title for the floundering studio.
Keep an eye out on GamesRadar for more Telltale updates in the coming weeks and months, and find out what other new games of 2018 might be worth playing this year.
