6 weeks after releasing Greedfall: The Dying World, famed eurojank studio Spiders is closing
Less than two months after the 1.0 release of Greedfall: The Dying World, French RPG studio Spiders is closing its doors. The surprise shutdown is fallout from the financial troubles of parent company Nacon, which filed for insolvency in February after its majority shareholder, Bigben Interactive, was unable to meet its own financial obligations.
The Spiders closure, first reported by French site Origami (Google translated), was confirmed by the studio today on Discord.
"After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated," Spiders community manager Elanor wrote. "This means the company as a whole no longer exists."
The DLC planned for Greedfall: The Dying World will still be released by Nacon, Eleanor said, while the Spiders Discord will be handed over to the community. "And then—well, that's it."
The Origami report says Nacon had hoped to sell off both Spiders and Nacon Tech, two of its four subsidiaries—all of which have also filed for insolvency, downstream from Nacon's issues—in order to generate the cash needed to resolve its insolvency problem. But it was unable to find a buyer, and with that effort having fallen through, liquidation was the only remaining option.
Spiders was founded in 2008 and established itself as a maker of ambitious but janky RPGs, including Of Orcs and Men, Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer, and Greedfall. But with each successive release, Spiders grew and improved; PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott selected its French Revolution RPG Steelrising as his personal GOTY for 2022.
The studio's latest release, Greedfall: The Dying World, was unfortunately something of a stumble: Spiders followed the early access trail blazed by Larian with Baldur's Gate 3 but had a much rougher time of it, and even though the final result was vastly improved, Shaun said it still felt a little undercooked.
That in itself probably wasn't a fatal blow: The lower stakes of Spiders' double-A games insulated it from the existential do-or-die faced by big budget studios like, say, BioWare. But the game industry has been decimated over the past few years by pressures including gross Covid mismanagement and a headlong embrace of AI, which means that where once Spiders may have been quickly snapped up by the likes of Embracer or Focus Home, it will now simply pass into memory: Another studio gone because the money guys biffed it.