Tale of Tales' Sunset

Or the page about my thoughts at length and their very big twitter blowout

A very quick aside but these articles are really good and have good breakdowns on why the game wasn't really a good commercial success regardless of how you feel about it as an art piece. I'm certainly not the only one to think the devs got a little too pretentious on it and more than a little too entitled that their successes on the art scene meant that they were entitled to immedaite commercial success. If you want further reading on this you can read the following articles that talk a bit more at length about it.

My honest thoughts is that there's a lot to unpack and the very short of it is outside of pretentiousness, they let their egos get too big on their successes with not games as art projects and felt entitled to all the commercial success while not doing any of the work that would be involved to create a commercially successful game. This is admittedly Really Harsh, but for the amount of praise and influence they got with games for their not games, It seems like they didn't do a lot of work or research into the whole process.

It's not that they were completely unfamiliar, and indie games at the time were still at least kind of a new thing, but the lack of research does show in some ways. Not to dunk on self publishing (there are many successful self-published games), but they absolutely could have and possibly should have talked to other game developers and video game publishers of the time and gotten a bit more informed.

The amount of dev time for this game is also a bit of a red flag in hindsight. It was announced in March of 2014 and then released in may of 2015 after a successful kickstarter campaign. It is a notably small development window, though some of it could be chalked up to it being what's generally called a "walking simulator game". Despite some dabbling in first person walking around in previous games and generally being good enough at game creation, the small development window feels like a red flag in hindsight.

Not that you can't make good games in a year or less (Mr Scott Cawthon, though I loathe to say his name, was famous for churning out four fnaf games in the span of two years, with each one iterating on the first game's whole gimmick while still also bringing something new to the table each time), but if you compare to other solo / small team indie developers, more often than not really commercially viable games took at least a year and a half if not more (with games like Cave Story, Axiom Verge, Owlboy and Iconoclasts all taking as long as or exceeding five years in development time, Owlboy in particular nearing ten years).

Near as I can tell the choices with regards to advertizing and marketing also may have played a role in this in that it seems like they didn't get people who were experienced with marketing for videogames. There were a lot of reports that came out after the fact that many people who might have been interested in this game didn't even know it was out until after things blew up on twitter (and the bad press there really turned it off). It is rough when working with the limited amount of money that they had to work with, but all across the board it seems like there was a refusal (intentional or unintentional, we might not know for sure) to actually utilize or engage with people who were in the business of handling games and making sure they're commercial success. No discussions with other commercially successful self published game developers, no reaching out to game publishers, no reaching out to marketers or advertizers who may have been familair with doing it for games and not for commercial art pieces. Sure they did invest in PR but this is a very good example of why you can't always just throw a PR company at everything and sometimes you need something a bit more targeted like a proper marketer / advertizer.

While I suppose one could make a decent counter argument that "well walking sim type games like this weren't really popular" I would say that they did miss a good opportunity. The game scene for walking sim type games was in fact taking off pretty well around that time, with plenty of games experimenting with similar yet adjacent gameplay loops focused on walking around in first person being decently successful. It's not as if outside of the audience of people who already liked their "not-game" games there would not be people who would at least give the game a decent good faith try. The fact that they didn't seem to put a whole lot / any effort on trying to sell this game to other people who liked this type of game / games in general outside of their own audience is mindboggling in hindsight.

To that extent it is a grave they dug for themselves made upon their own egos, their entitlement, and their hubris.

This is all setting aside the glaring issues that are present with the game on an engine level (it was notably unwieldy to play at the time of it's release and there's not been any QOL updates for probably obvious reasons so it's not an easy thing to play), as well as setting aside the fact that the story just wasn't good enough to keep the player engaged with chores (and I do mean chores; you play as someone who is looking after a place who has to do chores and they some how made it even more of a chore to complete the chores). Not to mention the fact that it feels very wishy washy on what it wants to try to engage with but then backs away from it. Lots of half-finished thoughts and the seeds of ideas that do not ever culminate into anything.

There's also the whole thing about comparing the political struggles and issues seen in Latin American countries (and the part the US government played in that) especially with US-Latin america relations issues to the civil rights movement in the US during the 1960's. I guess one could probably draw a very good comparison there but I do think you probably need to be at least fairly well informed to handle it in a way without dropping the ball on that like how the developers did (while I should specify that i'm neither Black nor from one of the many countries Tale of Tales may have based the made up country of Anchuria on, the comparison is so poorly done that even I gotta wince about it; they should have done more research on that then they did).

It's rough enough that they had a commercial flop, but rather than funneling that into creating something new and productive the way other game developers might have, they blew up on twitter (and you can pry calling it twitter from my cold dead hands, it's not X it's twitter). They famously raged against the people they felt scorned them. It didn't help that not a lot of people knew what all was happening and upon getting this immediate hostility dished it back as hard as they were getting it. This alienated every person who was already in their target audience from previous games, not to mention shoved away anybody in any sort of adjacent audience as well as gamers at large. Not a lot of the direct tweets themselves were archived which is a shame but the devs got what i'd like to call very very tilted. It was bad enough that people could tell and were in fact egging them on in the big twitter meltdown, which made the situation blow up even more due to trolling.

Nothing good comes from feeding trolls and they held a very large buffet on twitter.

the image is from this article, it is a good read but mostly wanted to show some of the archived tweets off since I find those very good at showing what I mean

If the grave wasn't dug by now, biting the hand very publicly absolutely was the last nail in the coffin.

It hit the presses hard and fast with how bad the meltdown was getting. This alongside the devs showing their entitlement put off a lot of people on principle (people who otherwise might have given this very mediocre game a decent shot).

To quote Trester Voll's steam review "when you look at the developer's dev diary and subsequent Twitter reactions to comments about it, I just can't support Tale of Tales no matter how much they've apparently 'given' to the indie scene with their pioneering art games. They disrespect an entire medium and audience because their game flopped. It flopped because it's a poor quality game and the marketing was abysmal."