Telltale Games has announced that it’s pushing the release date for The Wolf Among Us 2 back to next year.
In both a statement shared to social media as well as an exclusive with IGN, the studio explained that the decision was made in order to protect the health of its team and avoid crunch and burnout while also facing the reality that it needs more time to finish the game.
We’ve made the difficult decision to delay The Wolf Among Us 2 #TWAU2.
To give more context, we spoke with IGN: https://t.co/afoCUHZwIy pic.twitter.com/KhrAfIrwYB
— Telltale (@telltalegames) March 1, 2023
“If we put this game out and it’s not ready, we’re going to get torn to shreds,” Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie explained to IGN. “The expectations are pretty high, and we want time to meet those and we want to be proud of it and know that, ‘Hey, this is the best game we could have made.’ Let the world say what they will [once] it’s done, but at least we know that in these times, in these conditions, this is the best game that we could make.”
“I’ve done [crunch], and I don’t want to do it again, and it’s not fair to ask it,” he said. “You can’t plan a business around it. So yeah, part of it is about maintaining a healthy work culture. We don’t want to burn out our good people. It has been incredibly difficult to recruit the last two years between COVID and the labor markets and the growth in the games industry. So certainly, burning people out or grinding them down is the wrong thing to do long-term. It’s not how you build a business. And as an industry, we’re terrible about it. We burn our people out. We burn our best people out faster. And as an industry, if we’re going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We just have to stop doing it and make better choices.”
Head to the IGN article to read about the delay in greater detail.
