ShitLurker said:
Sure. Talking about Tale of Tales' implosion is kind of an evergreen topic.
They were the most darling of the indie darling set, funneling massive amounts of money to various journo groups to float their shitty "art games" that usually had about 10 minutes of play time, tops. I struggle to say that any of them are truly terrible in the sense that most of the JPATG bottom ten are - you won't find crash-prone pieces of shit cobbled together in MSPaint, for example, but you will find games that are a lot more for the spectacle and concept than they are for actual gameplay. Probably the best-known example of their work was The Graveyard, a hideously unfun walking simulator that's more an artistic piece than an actual game, but is still being charged $5 for on Steam right now.
Tale of Tales said:
All indie games should be Nuovo, otherwise what's the fucking point?
All of Tale of Tales' games are like this - ambitious art piece games that are very light on the gameplay and try to extol you to think "bigger" about their implications. In and of themselves, this is not a bad thing, and I'd even laud it if it weren't for how firmly Tale of Tales is up their own ass as a
company. Tale of Tales considered themselves to be the top of the pile as far as narrative storytelling, and this mutated into them shit-talking other developers - especially developers who made games that contain violence.
You know that stupid talking point Jack Thompson liked to trot out? The one about violent video games causing IRL violence? The one that is so comprehensively disproven that I shouldn't even need to discuss how disproven it is as of 2023?
Tale of Tales not only considered that statistic legit but actively blamed the industry itself for it - arguing that because violent games were being made, they were cultivating an audience that
is more violent - an argument which the more astute among you might realize is akin to blaming George Carlin for the existence of Carlos Mencina.
Needless to say, when you develop an ego to dwarf David Cage's and subsequently act like you're the god-given savior of gaming as an artform, people are going to inevitably lock onto your ass for some good-natured trolling. And none was more infamous, or caused more butthurt, than
that time Brote overran endless forest with about 60 of his followers. Needless to say, the longer this shit went on, the more clear it was that Tale of Tales fucking
hated the medium of video games, and still does. Tale of Tales constantly went on about how gaming as an industry was infested with people too
stupid to see the vision of the likes of Tale of Tales, and not worth engaging with in any way. Their ego had gone beyond most shitty indie devs by this point,
shit-talking concepts like meritocracy and
complaining endlessly about their own lack of sales.
Those more familiar with the goings-on of the shitty indie dev circuit Tale of Tales travels in, however, knows the bleaker truth of which Tale of Tales spared themselves the sight - that the majority of the Indie Games circuit at the time was a house of cards stacked upon nothing, relying on shitty game journalists to float them. The reason, for example, that
Fez won every single award the year it entered IGF is that IGF fucking
paid for it. The reason
Depression Quest blitzed through IndieCade is that IndieCade
fucking paid for it. But you can't gaslight a good indie game into existence with astroturfed reviews and "meaningful" concepts - gamers can sense a lack of authenticity very,
very effectively.
And that lets us momentarily segue into another topic: What
@Beautiful Border mentioned - about art games. What may be considered "art" is subjective. What is not subjective is the actual passion going into a game. I discussed it earlier,
during the Haydee 2 review, but a game that's designed with love - even if the game itself is trash - will have that love seep through at times, in ways players will notice. A game that's solely designed for a single dev's ego, however, no matter the cause, and shows no real love can be detected readily as such, even by someone as untrained in the arts of Vidya as
@CatParty is want to claim to be.
All of this made Tale of Tales' games fucking
ripe for mockery, parody, and ridicule. If they were smarter, and/or better devs, they'd be a good sport about it, and that humility very well may have actually done a lot to save the company its fate by its lonesome - but Tale of Tales, like many with huge egos, could not tolerate such derision, marking them firmly as the kind of company destined for a fall.
All of which leads to how Tale of Tales' business model
used to work. Tale of Tales went for the shovelware approach, but with a modern twist: Market games for cheap on Steam, use their journo buddies to promote the fucking things
endlessly to the masses, and if enough morons were tricked into buying it, the game was successful. With an average game price of about $5-10, and most of Tale of Tales' games being easy to get running on most platforms, Tale of Tales had a very small overhead and this made it very easy for them to get a return on their investment - enough to be comparatively successful at the small-time level at the time. The problem is that this was never successful
enough for Tale of Tales. And when games like
Hatred managed to sell like half a million copies based solely on the concept of "fuck Journalists," Tale of Tales seethed with fucking contempt for an audience who wouldn't willingly buy their shit.
That is, in fact, why Tale of Tales, like many devs, bemoaned the "plurality of markets," where anyone can buy what they want. Because if you can, you won't buy their shit.
All that setup leads us to Sunset. By this point, Tale of Tales was working on something huge. Its biggest game to date, a plot-heavy game serving partially as a historical piece, taking place in a south american city that's undergoing regime change. Everything about it is way above Tale of Tales' usual brand of shit, and while every drop of pretentious hogwaffle is still there, you can tell that, for once, they were actually really trying their best on it. And they knew that if they could get this launched and into the air, they could make back way more money than ever before, justifying the dev and advertising costs. They paid a fucking
fortune to the journoscum that year, getting massive ad buy-ins and preferential coverage from all the game mags. Soon, they'd be successful beyond their wildest dreams, using their personal game philosophy, and they'd be taken seriously as they started using their massive cash stockpile on even bigger, more ambitious projects. Everything was going to be awesome, even if people hated the game.
Unfortunately for Tale of Tales, two things happened prior to this that were going to deliver a rather vicious one-two punch. First, due to the ongoing Autism Holy War, less people trusted the game journalists than ever before. A recommendation from the likes of Polygon or Kotaku in 2015 no longer carried the same weight it did back in 2009, back when those outlets could keep their spaghetti in their pockets. Everyone knew that these clowns had an axe to grind now and were openly being paid off, when they weren't just pulling a Patricia Hernandez and floating devs they were friends with/financially supporting/fucking at the time, so not only were Tale of Tales getting a lot less bang for their buck for that reason, but Tale of Tales had also waded in on shit like the Hatred controversy and sperged out there, too, indicating to everyone that they were a soft target. Their game was going to get mercilessly ridiculed, that much was certain.
It was Gaben, however, who delivered the killshot. 2 weeks before Sunset released, Steam implemented its first-ever refund policy. Tale of Tales was never going to be able to make money using its development model again. All of its games were ridiculously short and now everyone would be able to play their crap and then subsequently refund it. Their massive ad buy-in and the enormous amount of money they funneled into game journalists to float their games was now, effectively, for nothing.
After refunds were factored in, Sunset moved under 4000 copies, over half of which went to crowdfunding backers.
Tale of Tales announced its retirement from the industry with all the good taste and maturity you've come to expect:
And so they ended, hated by their own fans and mocked by their enemies, a modern Icarus flight, a massive ego falling to earth in the funniest possible way.
