More companies will move into episodic games - Telltale

Following the success of episodic titles for Telltale Games, such as the Sam & Max seasons, other companies are now looking more closely at moving into the genre.

That's according to Telltale's CEO Dan Connors, who revealed to GamesIndustry.biz that "a lot of big publishers" have already been knocking at the door with ideas for their own franchises.

But increased competition isn't something that he's concerned by. "I think there's still that point about people needing to understand what it is, and Telltale is always going to define its own kind of game," explained Connors. "When we talked about our vision statement early as a company that, whenever people sit down and play a game of ours, they know it's a Telltale game. It has some set of qualities that is Telltale.

"So we want to be there and have people around us that are doing similar things, and we want to learn from them and that validates things. I will say that we've been hearing from a lot of big publishers that have ideas for their franchises, asking how we'd like to work with them."

However, it's not likely that we'll see a collaboration between Telltale and such a publisher any time soon - unless it's on the right terms.

"We're not a work-for-hire studio either, and that's a real hard thing for them to get their brains around," said Connors. "Telltale has built a business - we're an independent developer and publishers, we're going out and licensing, we're funding the products and we're monetising them.

"For economic health of the company, those are three critical pieces, so we just need to find relationships that will let us work in that context, or at least some of them."

The with full interview Dan Connors is available now.