Spiders liquidated, shrinking Nintendo's pool of trusted development partners

A Paris studio with 18 years of credits and a 94/100 gender-equality score was wiped out in a court-ordered liquidation, another sign that the mid-tier partners Nintendo relies on are getting harder to keep alive. Spiders, the GreedFall developer founded in 2008, said it would stop operating immediately after being told that "the company as a whole no longer exists."

The collapse followed Nacon’s insolvency filing on Feb. 25, 2026, when the publisher requested judicial reorganisation before the Commercial Court of Lille Métropole. Nacon said the trouble began after its majority shareholder, Bigben Interactive, could not make a partial repayment on a bond loan because its banking pool unexpectedly refused the drawdown. The company said it had informed employee representatives on Feb. 24 and argued that judicial reorganisation would let it keep trading, renegotiate debt and pursue a continuation plan under court supervision. In France, that process can freeze liabilities during an observation period of up to 18 months.

For Spiders, the formal liquidation was ordered on Apr. 29, and the French game workers’ union STJV said 71 employees would be affected. The union called it a "premeditated and deliberate choice" and argued that Nacon had turned Spiders into an internal shell after buying it in 2019. STJV said Nacon was simultaneously the studio’s owner, president and sole client, and alleged that Spiders received no royalties from games made after GreedFall. The union also said Nacon canceled a project codenamed Dark last year, refused to sign a new contract in time and blocked Spiders from looking for outside work, though those claims remain the union’s account.

Spiders said it had been informed after "a long period without clear answers" that liquidation was confirmed. The studio added that the planned DLC for GreedFall: The Dying World would still be released through Nacon, and that support questions should go to the publisher because the studio itself would no longer answer them. That separation matters: the intellectual property survives, but the production team and the institutional memory behind it do not.

STJV said Spiders was one of the oldest video game studios in France, with seven original games and four additional projects for other studios. Its back catalog includes Bound by Flame, Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer, GreedFall and Steelrising. The union also said Spiders was in preproduction on a new original game called Mist when liquidation hit, erasing another pipeline of work before it reached full production.

For Nintendo, where quality control depends on dependable co-development, porting and QA support, the lesson is straightforward. When a mid-sized partner disappears, the market loses capacity, redundancy and scheduling slack. Even a studio with recognizable credits and strong internal metrics can vanish once parent-company debt, client concentration and financing pressure collide, shrinking the pool of trusted collaborators around the platform.