Layoffs at Cyan
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Comments: 4 (plus live) (latest 1 hour later)
Tagged: cyan, myst, layoffs, ryan warzecha, greydragon
Layoffs at a game studio aren't news any more, but I guess I'm on this beat. If nothing else, this blog has a longer searchable history of Cyan history than Cyan does.
Yesterday Cyan posted one of those all-too-familiar dark-mode press releases:
Today we would like to share with you some very unfortunate news. Despite our best efforts to avoid it, Cyan has made the difficult decision to reduce our overall staff size—resulting in the layoff of twelve talented staff members, roughly half the team—effective at the end of March. Industry conditions have forced us into a tricky spot where we are having to weigh the future health of our studio against the month-to-month realities of game development in 2025. Throughout the past year, we have been ultra-transparent with the entire Cyan team about the choppy waters we find ourselves in, as well as the dangers ahead. While the news of a layoff was not a surprise to the team, it was (and is) still deeply saddening for all of us. Although we have done our best to pad the landing for those affected with severance packages, we would implore any fellow developers looking for world-class talent to reach out. For now, our number one priority is to secure financing for our next project, and to restabilize the studio. We've been around for a very long time, and have been through tough times before. Our sincere hope is to continue to be around, and to provide the types of experiences that only Cyan can deliver. As always, we are grateful for all the love and support from our amazing player community. Sincerely, Cyan Leadership
--@cyan.com, March 28 (also Instagram and probably other forums)
(Cyan people confirmed on Discord that this was discussed in advance within the company.)
The Bluesky thread goes on to link a list of ten of the affected people. The only name I recognize is Ryan "Greydragon" Warzecha, who's been a producer and animator at Cyan going back to the Uru days. I recall Ryan telling me in 2018 that he'd been laid off by Cyan three times! I guess now it's four.
This news comes right after their announcement that Firmament has entered Playstation certification, and a week after they released Rime for the new Myst. In retrospect, it looks like they've been clearing the backlog of dev work before the planned layoff.
Why did this happen? Cyan hasn't given any more detail, but the only possible answer is "Myst and Riven didn't sell as well as we'd hoped." And whoever they called to get financing hasn't come through.
Note that Cyan is an independent studio which is still owned by its original founders. A lot of these layoff announcements happen when a corporate megalith controls a studio and decides to slash it for the sake of their quarterly earning calls. But that's not what's happening here.
The "next project" Cyan mentions is the "new game in the D'ni-verse" -- that is, the Myst setting but not a direct sequel to the Myst series. We recall that they snuck the word "PREFALL" into a store page, so that's what fans have been calling it.
(Cyan has never ever called this game "Myst 6". Then again, around 2022 CDPR was insisting that the next Witcher game would never be called "The Witcher 4". Sometimes Marketing wins the argument.)
Whatever the title, Cyan has a game planned, and they still have enough people to make progress on it while they hunt for funding. Presumably if they get money they'll hire back up.
What about Kickstarter?
Cyan bootstrapped themselves out of their post-Uru slump by running Kickstarters for Obduction and Firmament. (Also some stuff in 2018 celebrating Myst's 25th anniversary; but that was primarily aimed at long-time fans.)
However, it's notable that neither Obduction nor Firmament was fully funded by those Kickstarters. Crowdfunding brought in seed money and an estimate of audience interest that Cyan could use to secure platform funding. Once those games shipped -- in fact, even before Firmament -- Cyan was able to leverage their track record to get financing directly. At that point they didn't need Kickstarter any more.
I guess it's not impossible that they'd try again, but it seems unlikely to work. Crowdfunding is depressed in the current economy just like everything else. And even if a campaign succeeded, Cyan would still need to go out looking for full funding. Which is what they're doing now.
Historical context
Cyan has been up and down, size-wise, since Riven shipped. For a few weeks in 2005 they shut down completely! That was after the original Myst Online launch was cancelled; they spent a year putting Myst 5 together out of leftover pieces, got it out the door, and laid off everybody.
Three weeks later Gametap agreed to fund Myst Online, and Cyan started back up. Except the relaunch didn't go great, and they wound up laying off a bunch of people again in 2008.
Then they went through the Kickstarter stuff I just mentioned. They scaled up again for Obduction, and then scaled back down after that shipped. ("About ten developers" in 2018.) Then Firmament was funded, and they were back up again. Myst got platform funding in 2019 (Facebook by all reports), which carried Cyan through Riven. But no farther, it seems.
So this is just another loop on the roller coaster. We hope! The badness of 2025 is really unprecedented. (You can talk about 1983 but the industry was so much smaller then.) Maybe the investment industry will decide to diversify and start putting money into smaller studios. Maybe the entire US economy will tank. Really no point making predictions at this stage.
Like I said last week: check back in August for the news from Mysterium.
Comments from Mastodon
@isquiesque @zarfeblong The Riven remake they released last year is pretty great, they re-imagined a lot of it and added new lore and story elements.
The Myst remaster is also very pretty, and they released the Rime Age last week, also remade with more story.
@zarfeblong That's a really interesting reminder of Cyan's history. I knew about the post-Uru freeze, but not the layoffs after Obduction. I suppose they had to finish Rime and the Firmament PS4/5 port before letting the devs go. I hope the Firmament port will help them port Riven more easily, and maybe secure a little more revenue.
Regarding names, I also recognized Autumn Palfenier, who was Animation Lead. I suppose this makes it unlikely for "Prefall" to feature much, if any 3D characters...
@artean If they never get money to hire back a full production team, I figure the game just won't ship.
Comments from Mastodon (live)
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@zarfeblong I hate to admit this, but I didn't even realize that they were still a studio, which I suppose is part of the issue. I do love their work and feel bad that I have been missing out on supporting it.