Telltale CEO Jamie Ottilie Declares Premium Mobile Games Unprofitable
Over the years, story-driven episodic games like The Walking Dead series, “The Wolf Among Us” and even names like the “Life is Strange series” have grown in popularity. This rise is due to their unique approach to storytelling and character development – offering a fresh style of play tailored to players looking for an experience where their choices have a significant impact on the overarching story.
Recently, at the Next World Forum organized by the Saudi Esports Federation, Shaurya Sharma of ReturnByte Tech spoke with Jamie Ottilie, CEO of game developer Telltale Games, known for creating timeless classics such as The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead.
The conversation revolved around a number of topics – including the anticipated release of The Wolf Among Us 2, the challenges and differences between Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Engine 4 game development, and the burning questions surrounding subscription models like Xbox GamePass and Sony’s PS Plus.
Q. How is the development of The Wolf Among Us 2 coming along?
Jamie: The development of The Wolf Among Us 2 is going really well. We are very excited about what we have. We should probably show it a bit more early next year, but we’re not ready to give a release date yet. Nevertheless, we are very pleased with the progress.
Q: You switched to Unreal Engine 5 in the middle of development. How does developing with Unreal Engine 5 differ from Unreal Engine 4?
Jamie: Actually yeah, that’s one of the reasons we’ve been a little slow. The benefits of UE5 outweighed the time costs. So you should expect to see the best looking Telltale game you’ve ever seen. As for the difference: the most important thing for us was really the virtual people and the animation production pipeline.
That was really important for us performance-wise, so it really simplified those parts for my team. And then – looking ahead – we knew new devices would come and UE5 was designed to support that (current gen consoles like PS5, Xbox Series X/S). So we wanted to make sure we were ready for what was coming.
Q. From a developer perspective, what do you think about the subscription model that companies offer (think GamePass, PS Plus)?
Jamie: Honestly, we’re wary of subscription models because they tend to limit the benefits of content creators. First and foremost, we are content producers, but we strongly support growing ecosystems. It really depends on what consumers intend to spend their time and money on. And if Sony and Microsoft can continue to grow their audience like this, it makes sense to us.
Q. Telltale has been one of the pioneers when it comes to porting games to mobile platforms. How has business been for the company?
Jamie: So, what was challenging for us as a platform was that we sell premium games, and as you know, on mobile, that’s not a very successful business model anymore. So we’ve actually seen how the share of our revenue has gone down in terms of mobile revenue. That being said, we still want the public to have access to it. We recently acquired a company in the UK called Flavorworks, whose technology allows us to deliver games to mobile devices while maintaining the graphical fidelity we have on Playstation, Xbox and PC.
So we’re always looking for new ways to support this audience. We’ll probably experiment a bit with this model and see if we can change that income picture.
