Spiders

» see spiders-games.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Spiders was a Paris studio that made role-playing games nobody would call big. It was founded in 2008 by developers from Monte Cristo who had just finished Silverfall and wanted to stay together, with Jehanne Rousseau running it. For most of its life it did two things at once: contract work porting other people's games, and its own RPGs on a fraction of what the genre's famous names spend.

The catalog is a steady line of that: Faery: Legends of Avalon in 2010, Of Orcs and Men in 2012, Mars: War Logs the year after, Bound by Flame, The Technomancer. They were rough and they were ambitious in places where rough games are not supposed to be ambitious, which bought the studio a following that argued for it in public. GreedFall in 2019 was the one that broke through, a colonial-era RPG with a diplomacy system people actually talked about, and it sold better than anything the studio had done before.

Steelrising followed in 2022, a souls-like set during the French Revolution with a clockwork automaton for a protagonist. By then the studio belonged to someone else.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the silk engine ~

Every Spiders game ran on the studio's own technology, a heavily modified version of Sony's PhyreEngine that they called the Silk Engine. That is the whole business model in one decision: a team of this size either licenses an engine it cannot afford to customize or maintains its own and spends the saving on content. Spiders maintained its own for eighteen years.

~ bigben, then nacon ~

In July 2019, two months before GreedFall shipped, Bigben Interactive bought the studio. Bigben had been collecting developers for years by then, Kylotonn and Cyanide among them, and it renamed the whole group Nacon soon after. Spiders kept making Spiders games inside it.

Nacon filed for insolvency in February 2026. GreedFall: The Dying World, the prequel the studio had been building for years, came out on 10 March into that. Reviews landed in the sixties. In March the subsidiaries started filing too, Spiders among them, and by mid-April the parent was trying to sell both Spiders and its motion-capture arm. The French outlet Origami reported that nobody came forward.

~ first-degree murder ~

The studio broke a month of silence on 29 April 2026 with a short post. It apologized for the silence and said it had finally been told that Spiders was being liquidated. Then it spelled out what that meant: the company as a whole no longer exists, functions cease immediately, the planned DLC will come out through Nacon, direct your questions there because nobody here can answer them.

The STJV, the French video game workers' union, published a reply calling the liquidation first-degree murder and a premeditated choice by Nacon's management, the argument being that the studio was left without a follow-on contract once its last game was delivered. Six months on, spiders-games.com has no DNS record at all, and the DLC for the final game is still scheduled.

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