Spiders Studio Liquidated Following Nacon Insolvency

Spiders, the French studio behind Greedfall and Steelrising, has officially ceased operations. The shutdown comes just weeks after the team released Greedfall: The Dying World, a prequel to their flagship RPG series. This marks the end of an 18-year run for a developer that carved out a niche in the mid-budget RPG space.

The news arrived via a Facebook post on April 29, 2026, where the studio cut straight to the point. Notebookcheck documented the announcement, which stated the parent company no longer exists and functions will cease immediately. The planned DLC will still release through Nacon, but that's where the support ends. Players with issues should contact Nacon directly, as Spiders will no longer be able to reply.

What happened here is less about creative failure and more about corporate collapse. Trouble started in February 2026 when Nacon's major shareholder, Bigben Interactive, failed to repay a €43 million partial payment on a bond loan. Nacon filed for insolvency and put multiple subsidiaries up for sale. No buyers came forward. Spiders became the first major studio casualty of this financial implosion.

Seventy-one workers lost their jobs. That's the number cited by the French video game workers' union STJV, which called the closure "a premeditated and deliberate choice by Nacon's management." The union encouraged fans to boycott the publisher entirely. Officially, the liquidation is blamed on Spiders not making enough profit and the absence of a takeover offer. In reality, it's a deliberate process on Nacon's part (a distinction that matters when you're the one staring at an empty inbox). The union's language is sharp, but the math is simple: no buyer, no future.

IGN corroborated the timeline and scope of the closure. The studio had been around since 2008, initially finding work porting titles to Xbox 360 before developing original IPs in the 2010s. Greedfall sold over 2 million copies in its first three years, prompting the sequel that entered early access in 2024 and saw full release last month. The timing is brutal. Just weeks prior to the game's release, Nacon filed for insolvency and attempted to sell Spiders. A buyer couldn't be found.

Inside the studio, developers were reportedly updating resumes and holding "self-study sessions" in place of working on games, according to French outlet Origami as reported by Game Informer. The court-appointed administrator overseeing Nacon's restructuring will request Spiders' liquidation before the commercial court. Sources say this is a mere formality at this stage. The game launched in March 2026. The studio is gone by late April.

It's unclear if any of Spiders' IP or assets will be sold off or used by Nacon in other ways. It seems relatively unlikely, given Spiders doesn't own any other major or notable franchises. Greedfall: The Dying World was also met with a mixed reception from fans and critics. Some reviews called it average-ish. Others noted the publisher's bankruptcy put the kibosh on any marketing. When you don't advertise a game, of course no one buys it. They don't even know it exists.

The physical reality of this shutdown is stark. Imagine opening your email to find a message from a studio you've followed for years, telling you they're liquidated. No more patches. No more community updates. No more Steam support tickets answered by the actual developers. Just a redirect to a publisher's customer service line that may or may not exist in six months. The DLC will release via Nacon, and then... well, that's it.

Industry watchers fear more subsidiaries like Kylotonn and Cyanide are next on the chopping block. At the beginning of 2026, Nacon was confident that its upcoming releases would remain on track while it addressed the ongoing storm. Now, Spiders is gone. The storm didn't pass. It just moved to the next studio.

Whether users actually pay for the remaining DLC remains the real question. Whether Nacon can deliver on promises made by a liquidated studio is another. The games are out there. The servers might stay up for a while. But the people who made them are already looking for new work. That's the end of an era, plain and simple.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn