After Almost 20 Years, This Prolific RPG Studio Is Shutting Down

Greedfall: The Dying World developer Spiders has confirmed that it is officially shutting down. The Paris-based studio says that it is being liquidated, with operations ceasing immediately.

“We’re going to cut straight to the chase so you’re not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated,” the studio said in a statement. “This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We’ll cease our functions immediately. We’re sorry that it’s come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.”

The shutdown comes in the wake of Spiders’ parent company Nacon filing for insolvency after the majority shareholder in the publisher, Bigben Interactive, began experiencing financial difficulties of its own. The Greedfall: The Dying World DLC will still be released–through Nacon–and the Spiders Discord channel will be handed over to the community, the studio added.

Created in 2008 by former developers from the French studio Monte Cristo, Spiders released several games using its in-house Silk Engine. The studio would kick off its run with an Xbox 360 port of Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper, and its first original project was the 2010 fantasy game Faery: Legends of Avalon. Over the next decade, it’d work on another Sherlock Holmes port and several more original projects, like Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer, and the first Greedfall game.

In the 2020s, the studio released Steelrising–a clockwork-themed souls-like that made the genre approachable thanks to its custom difficulty settings–and Greedfall: The Dying World arrived via early access in 2024, eventually launching in 1.0 form in 2026.

The last few years have been brutal for video game developers, as numerous studios have closed down across the industry. Notable examples include Ubisoft’s production studios in Osaka and San Francisco, following the company’s decision to sunset the multiplayer shooter XDefiant, and Monolith Productions was also shuttered, with its Wonder Woman project getting canceled.

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