The development studio that’s responsible for both GreedFall games, as well as the 2022 French Revolution-set Soulslike Steelrising, will soon be closing.
Spiders is shutting down
Spiders may not have been the most highly regarded French video game maker, but some of its games have been able to find small followings throughout its 18-year history. Perhaps its most well-received game was its 2019 RPG GreedFall, which brought players on a fantasy adventure through a fictionalized 17th century island. Spiders got its start in the Xbox 360 era and was a frequent collaborator with publisher Focus Home Interactive, now known as PulluP Entertainment. The studio took a bold step into the realm of Soulslikes in 2022 with Steelrising, but the game ultimately didn’t leave much of a mark in the genre.
Spiders’ most recent game, GreedFall 2: The Dying World, was released just over a month ago, on March 12. A prequel to the first game, GreedFall 2 received mixed reviews and currently hovers in the 60s on Metacritic. Launching a few days before fellow fantasy RPG Crimson Desert surely didn’t do it any favors either, as Crimson Desert was and still is one of the most talked about games in the early months of 2026.
Spiders failed to find a buyer amid Nacon restructure
As reported by Gautheir Andres of French outlet Origami, Spiders is about to be shut down. The studio’s parent company, Nacon, which acquired Spiders in 2019, had been undergoing a restructure after filing for insolvency in February. This led Nacon to look to sell off Spiders, as well as its motion capture house Nacon Tech, by the middle of April, but Spiders was not able to find its savior and will thus be closing down over the coming days.
The past few years have been rocky for Spiders since the release of Steelrising. The studio underwent a leadership change in 2023 after taking on two projects at once, one of them being GreedFall 2, and the other being an unannounced licensed project. For a studio made up of under 100 developers, juggling two AA projects at once was surely a serious challenge, and the unannounced title was scrapped last year.
It’s hard to know what the future holds for the ex-Spiders developers. Perhaps a portion of them will stick together and form a new independent studio, as has been the story of many new studios that have cropped up across the industry. Nevertheless, despite its mixed output, Spiders will surely be a studio that’s missed within the AA gaming space.
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