The Wolf Among Us 2 delayed to 2024 to avoid crunch

The Wolf Among Us 2 will not be releasing this year, Telltale Games announced.

Speaking to IGN, the studio said it's pushing the awaited sequel back to 2024 to avoid crunch and burnout among the staff, but also because it's making the switch from Unreal Engine 4 to UE5.

Telltale Games CEO Jamie Ottilie also mentioned the challenges of building the studio during the pandemic and directly addressed wanting to avoid crunch as well, a stance he had already committed to when the studio relaunched in 2019.

"Making games is difficult and they need time to be right," he told IGN. "And it doesn't do any of us any good to ship something that's not ready."

He continued: "I've done [crunch], and I don't want to do it again, and it's not fair to ask it. You can't plan a business around it. So yeah, part of it is about maintaining a healthy work culture. We don't want to burn out our good people. It has been incredibly difficult to recruit the last two years between COVID and the labour markets and the growth in the games industry.

"So certainly, burning people out or grinding them down is the wrong thing to do long-term. It's not how you build a business. And as an industry, we're terrible about it. We burn our people out. We burn our best people out faster. And as an industry, if we're going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We just have to stop doing it and make better choices."

Last month, Telltale raised $8 million as part of a Series A funding round led by Hiro Capital. The funds will go towards the launch of The Expanse: A Telltale Series (due this summer), the development of The Wolf Among Us 2, and another unannounced title.

The developer was rescued and relaunched by LCG Entertainment in 2019, after shutting down seemingly overnight in September 2018.