Spiders, the Parisian studio that spent almost two decades building ambitious, imperfect, deeply sincere role-playing games, is closing. The liquidation is reportedly a formality at this point as no buyer came forward before the mid-April deadline.
The court-appointed administrator overseeing parent company Nacon’s restructuring will file for full liquidation, and that will be that. Staff have reportedly been spending their final days updating resumes and holding self-study sessions instead of making games. They turned their last weekly drinks gathering into a formal tribute to the studio’s run.
Spiders was founded in 2008 by developers who had worked on Silverfall, and spent its early years grinding out smaller RPGs and licensed titles before anyone was really paying attention. Then came Mars War Logs, and The Technomancer, and a reputation started forming around a studio that consistently attempted more than its budget should have allowed.
The games were janky. The writing was uneven. The production values were, generously speaking, modest. None of that really mattered, because something in the work kept pulling people in anyway.
GreedFall in 2019 was the moment everything clicked. A colonial-era RPG with a genuinely unusual setting and a choice-driven narrative that felt, if not quite like BioWare, then like a studio that had been studying BioWare carefully and pouring everything it had into the attempt. It found an audience. It found a cult. Nacon acquired the studio on the strength of it.
Steelrising followed in 2022 with one of the more inventive Soulslike premises anyone had come up with: an automaton fighting clockwork soldiers in a nightmare alternate French Revolution. The reception was mixed, but people remembered it.
GreedFall 2: The Dying World launched in March, just six weeks ago. It peaked at under 1,000 concurrent Steam players. The STJV union blamed years of mismanagement by Nacon leadership, citing canceled projects, deteriorating working conditions, and a fixation on short-term profits that hollowed out studios that had otherwise been viable.
The people who made these games deserved better than this ending. Here’s hoping they land on their feet.
