Valve recently removed the option to buy the Telltale-developed series Tales From The Borderlands on Steam, and Good Old Games has announced it will no longer be selling any of Telltale’s games starting May 27. Nobody seems to know why.
Reddit user Andreas_Pires first spotted that Tales From The Borderlands had lost its purchase option on Steam just after midnight this morning. A few hours later, a customer relations representative for GOG posted on the digital marketplace’s forums that all Telltale games would soon be leaving the store.
“Sadly, we need to inform you that, due to company’s closure, all the remaining Telltale titles will be delisted from our catalogue on Monday, May 27, 10am UTC,” it wrote.
Some of the other Telltale games soon to be removed from GOG include The Wolf Among Us, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and Batman: The Telltale Series. “We’ve received an official agreement termination and title takedown notice for all Telltale titles, and we are processing it within the appropriate time frame,” a spokesperson for GOG told Kotaku in an email.
With the exception of Tales from the Borderlands, the rest of the games are still available on Steam, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tales from the Borderlands, apart from being a great game, has also become newly relevant after Gearbox announced that Borderlands 3’s story will pick up where the events of that game left off.
“We are working to get Tales from the Borderlands back up on digital storefronts as soon as possible,” a spokesperson for 2K Games, the publisher of Borderlands, told Eurogamer earlier today.
“All prior digital purchases of the game will of course still be honored and supported.” When contacted by Kotaku, 2K declined to elaborate on why the game was being removed in the first place.
Tales from the Borderlands was developed and published by Telltale Games in 2014 under a licence from 2K. Following layoffs of hundreds of employees without severance last fall and Telltale’s subsequent closure, it’s unclear what will become of the rest of its games still being sold and whether their removal from some stores is only temporary or could end up being indefinite.
Kotaku spoke with five former Telltale employees, who wished to remain anonymous, who said they had no idea why some games, like Tales from the Borderlands, are only now being delisted, but their uncertain future has been newly demoralising to some.
Said one former Telltale developer: “Seeing games they crunched over and poured their hearts into suddenly disappear from the universe is a huge gut-punch.”
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