Spiders Dead Six Weeks After GreedFall 2 Launched

Six weeks. That's how long GreedFall 2: The Dying World has been on shelves before its developer apparently ceased to exist. French outlet Origami reports that Nacon's court-appointed administrator will request liquidation of Spiders before the commercial court tomorrow, a step sources describe as a formality. No buyer was found.

Spiders spent 18 years making the kind of mid-budget RPGs that bigger publishers stopped greenlighting a decade ago. The Technomancer, GreedFall, Steelrising; none of them were polished blockbusters, but they all swung harder than they had any right to. The studio was founded in 2008 by ex-Monte Cristo developers, and it carved out a niche by being unapologetically weird and French in a genre dominated by North American and Polish studios. Inside the office, developers have reportedly been updating resumes and holding self-study sessions instead of working on games. Staff chose to turn their final weekly drink into a tribute to the studio's history, according to discussion on ResetEra.

The blame falls squarely on parent company Nacon, which filed for insolvency in March and dragged multiple studios down with it. French video game union STJV didn't mince words, accusing Nacon's executives of "disdain for video game production" and saying their incompetence "actively sabotaged studios which were viable until their acquisition." I'm inclined to believe them. GreedFall 2 struggled through a rough Early Access period and peaked at under 1,000 concurrent Steam players, but a studio that survived 18 years on tight budgets and niche audiences doesn't just collapse overnight without mismanagement from above.

Spiders joins a growing list of closures this year, but this one stings more than most. Studios willing to ship a B-tier RPG with creative ambition are already rare. Now there's one fewer. GreedFall 2: The Dying World is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, and its subtitle has aged into something unbearably on the nose.