Telltale turns five, flaunts over 1m sales

Californian digital game advocates Telltale is celebrating how great it’s doing.

Formed from ex-LucasArtsers in 2004, the group started out with an objective to avoid life-shortening AAA developments and instead work on safer and more straightforward digital content.

Crucial to the firm’s unique position is how it doesn’t sell downloadable titles as isolated products, but instead as small installments of an ongoing franchise ‘series’.

The idea seems to have paid off. Telltale has made episodic content for properties such as Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit and Strong Bad. Five years in, the group has sold over one million copies of these episodes across services such as Steam and WiiWare.

"In the last five years, we have constructed the infrastructure to license, build, and distribute multiple seasons of episodic content," said CEO and co-founder Dan Connors. "Now Telltale finds itself in a leadership position as the digital marketplace for games continues to shape itself and grow."

The group continues to expand its portfolio, with the most recent Wallace & Gromit series coming to XBLA. A new Wallace & Gromit season will be shown at E3.

"The episodic model has been incredibly rewarding from a development standpoint," said co-founder Kevin Bruner. "It used to be we only made two or three games a decade. At Telltale, we release a new game every month, which fosters greater creativity with the teams, and the customers get to enjoy more content on a regular basis.”