Bah, it’s never fun writing one of these, but unfortunately Myst and Riven developer Cyan Worlds have laid off 12 of its staff members this week, supposedly cutting the studio by about half. Cyan shared the news on its social media accounts yesterday, noting that “industry conditions” have “forced” the studio to “weigh the future health of our studio against the month-to-month realities of game development in 2025.”
The post also states that it has been communicating with the entire team about the “choppy waters” it has been in, and that the layoffs weren’t a surprise for the team, so it sounds like it has been a long time coming. At the very least those affected will be getting severance packages, but I imagine that’s not quite enough consolation. Also worth noting is that the studio’s current priority is to “secure financing for our next project.”
Cyan friends and family, we have some difficult news to share today.
(More details in-thread below.)
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— Cyan Worlds 🌟 Riven (remade) out now! (@cyan.com) March 28, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Cyan are a long-running developer, having been founded almost 40 years ago. They’re obviously best known as the studio behind Myst and Riven, having focused on remakes of both titles in recent years. The latter was just released last year, and was broadly well received, so you have to wonder what went wrong. Plenty of indie studios are struggling to find funding at the moment, but it’s not always as simple as something as that, as we all know. For what it’s worth, Cyan did also provide a list of employees impacted by the layoffs to help them get new work.
I really do hope Cyan manages to pull through, and that all the laid off staff manage to land on their feet. Honestly, I can’t think of another developer with half as much history, let alone 37 years of it. Fingers crossed for all those involved.
