Studio Behind Unique RPGs Shutting Down After 18 Years

There’s apparently no hope for Spiders to survive its current debt restructuring amid parent company Nacon’s insolvency. French outlet Origami reports that the court procedures the RPG maker is currently going through are essentially just a “formality” at this point as sources within the 18-year-old Parisian studio scramble to find other jobs.

“The CSE is organizing, as best it can, the buyback of equipment by employees who wish to do so, and the Spiders staff has chosen to turn tonight’s final weekly drink into a formal tribute to the studio’s eighteen years of existence,” Origami writes. Spiders was one of a number of studios Nacon was trying to find a buyer for as it faces insolvency. A spokesperson for Nacon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Spiders was founded in 2008 by developers who had previously worked at Monte Cristo on Silverfall, a top-down fantasy action-RPG for the PlayStation Portable. The studio released a number of smaller, quick-turnaround RPGs and licensed games in the years that followed. It wasn’t until 2016’s Technomancer, a sci-fi game set in a futuristic Mars colony, that the studio’s work began breaking through to a larger audience. It was a poorly-reviewed jank-fest, but it also took the kind of creative swings that more established studios had given up on.

“There’s something endearing about The Technomancer,” former Kotaku editor Luke Plunkett wrote at the time. “It starts with that dumb-ass name and runs right through the story and art design to the scope of the whole project. This is the little RPG that could…the more you play/suffer through this, the more it somehow grows on you. The more you notice, for all the initial similarities this has with other games and its shortcomings in terms of presentation, there’s a lovable French weirdness going on here. What first felt familiar soon starts to itch.”

The studio subsequently moved onto more ambitious and polished games, including 2019’s merchant-core RPG GreedFall and 2022’s French Revolution-inspired Soulslike Steelrising. Unfortunately, Spiders’ latest game, GreedFall 2: The Dying World, stumbled through a rough Early Access launch and failed to live up to fan expectations.

French video game union Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo blamed publisher Nacon and its executives for the studio’s recent mismanagement. “Their disdain for video game production and their incompetence actively sabotaged studios which were viable until their acquisition, and jeopardized projects with a high potential,” it said in a statement released back in March.

It continued, “The deterioration of working conditions in the last years, and the creation of new studios with the barely hidden goal of sabotaging existing ones, were already convoluted ways of reducing headcount and they only made matters worse.”