Spiders, the French studio behind GreedFall and The Technomancer, has officially shut down for good - and if you thought this was just another sad-but-isolated studio closure, you might want to sit down for this one. According to DualShockers, the closure could be a canary-in-the-coal-mine moment for what's left of the so-called "RPG middle class."
Who even were Spiders, and why should you care?
For the uninitiated, Spiders occupied that precious sweet spot in the RPG ecosystem - not quite Baldur's Gate 3 budget, not quite a janky indie passion project either. They were the AA tier: ambitious, rough around the edges, but delivering full-fat role-playing experiences for players who didn't need a AAA price tag attached to their loot tables.
GreedFall, their most successful title, punched well above its weight class. It wasn't perfect - think of it as a souls-lite RPG with the difficulty set to "manageable" and a colonial-era fantasy setting that actually tried to say something meaningful. It found a real audience, which makes this closure sting even harder.
The disappearing middle ground
DualShockers frames the Spiders closure as part of a wider pattern where mid-tier studios are getting squeezed out of existence. The economics are brutal - AAA budgets keep inflating like a final boss health bar, indie games are flourishing at the bottom, but the studios living in between are finding it increasingly hard to respawn.
The AA RPG space specifically is getting hit hard. These are the studios that take swings on weird settings, experimental mechanics, and niche genres without the safety net of a $70 price tag or a live-service monetization scheme to fall back on. When they fail, they don't just lose - they disappear entirely.
A bad omen for RPG fans everywhere
Here's the uncomfortable truth: if studios like Spiders can't survive making competent, passionate RPGs with an established fanbase, what does that mean for the next developer trying to carve out that same space? The market is essentially telling mid-tier RPG devs to either git gud at raising massive funding or go home.
Losing Spiders doesn't just mean no more GreedFall sequels - it means one fewer studio willing to roll the dice on the kind of weird, imperfect, genuinely interesting RPGs that keep the genre from becoming a duopoly between Larian and FromSoftware. Press F to pay respects, and maybe actually buy those AA games when they release instead of waiting for a 90% Steam sale.
