Reigns creators freeze studio and lay off staff

British studio Nerial, creator of Reigns, Card Shark and The Crush House, is halting development and laying off its remaining staff. Co-founders François and Tamara Alliot announced on social media that the studio is entering «hibernation mode»; in practice that means the end of development after 13 years and 11 released games.

The decision was not made alone: according to the founders, development was wound down jointly with partners at Devolver — the publisher that has owned Nerial since 2021.

What remains after Nerial

The backbone of the studio's catalogue was the Reigns franchise, including the licensed Reigns: Game of Thrones and Reigns: The Witcher. Beyond those, Nerial released Card Shark and The Crush House. The founders thanked colleagues at Devolver Digital and other organisations they worked with on the licensed games.

For developers, the team's own write-ups remain: they describe in detail how the internal systems of Reigns and The Crush House are built.

Right now it is the employees who are hit hardest. The founders published a series of posts in which they spoke about each team member individually, and asked other studios to hire them — a practice that has become a routine part of such announcements in recent years. The main practical signal for the market is this: another group of specialists with experience on niche auteur projects is entering it.

Being acquired by a publisher was no insurance

Nerial operated independently until 2021, when it was bought by Devolver Digital. In 2024 Devolver cut 40% of the studio's staff, and now development is being wound down entirely. About five years passed between the purchase and the shutdown.

The founders opened their announcement with a line about «another post with text on a grim background» — a nod to the string of similar messages the industry has been filled with since late 2022. They noted that they had launched Nerial «with no expectations and no ambitions».

At the same time, François and Tamara stated that for them this is «not the end of gamedev»: they need a pause to make sense of what happened before «returning to their roots» with a fresh perspective. They gave no timeline or plans.

Why «hibernation» is heard more often than «closure»

Against the backdrop of a years-long wave of layoffs, the phrase «hibernation mode» looks like an attempt to leave the door ajar: the announcement says nothing about liquidating the studio, and the franchise rights presumably remain with the publisher — meaning Reigns could theoretically return with a different team or as a licensed project. For the employees, though, the difference between «hibernation» and closure is small: everyone loses their job.

Behind this there is probably a broader process. Publishers that eagerly bought up independent teams at the start of the decade are now reviewing their portfolios and keeping what delivers predictable returns. Auteur games built on a single mechanic are unpredictable by definition: they either find an audience or they don't, and averaging out such risk inside a large portfolio is difficult. If the trend holds, small studios with experimental projects will find it harder to secure a publisher willing to fund them for years, and some of those teams will return to releasing small games on their own — the model Nerial once started with.

What played the main role in Nerial's closure — the bet on small premium games, fatigue with the Reigns formula, the overall downturn in the mobile market?