In the 1990s, the puzzle adventure game Myst sold more than 6 million copies—so many that WIRED credited it with sparking the widespread adoption of CD-ROM drives. It remained the bestselling PC game of all time until 2002, when The Sims set a new record.
Last week—after four sequels, one spinoff, and five remakes—the creators of Myst released a trailer for a new game in the franchise. Codenamed Anglerfish, it’s a darker chapter in the Myst series where you, the player, are held hostage in a strange world. Your captor is a writer with a temper, voiced and motion captured in a stunning performance by Noshir Dalal, known for his work in Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Ghost of Yōtei. Reactions to the trailer on YouTube were ecstatic.
The only problem? Anglerfish died months ago when no one agreed to fund it.
“Even the publishers who felt passionate about the project couldn’t get their higher-ups to let the money flow,” says Eric A. Anderson, creative director at Cyan Worlds, the oldest surviving independent game studio in America. After spending four months developing a fully playable demo, Cyan pitched the game to more than a dozen publishers at last year’s Game Developers Conference and the Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (D.I.C.E) Summit, where Cyan’s recent remake of Riven: The Sequel to Myst was nominated for a D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction.
Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. But even though the demo was positively received by most publishers, Cyan went home empty-handed, put Anglerfish on ice, and soon laid off 12 people, roughly half of its staff.
“If we were pitching that game just a few years earlier, it would have been a no-brainer,” says John Eternal, the former global lead of partner development at PlayStation, who helped Cyan pitch Anglerfish. “But funding for double-A games has evaporated.”
Like movies and books, video games are currently facing a middle-market collapse. At the top, so-called triple-A studios like Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto VI), Naughty Dog (The Last of Us), and Bungie (Marathon) regularly spend more than $200 million to develop and market a single game. At the bottom, micro-indie studios usually spend less than $1 million.
Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
In between the triple-A and micro-indie extremes, there used to be a healthy double-A studio ecosystem where games were heavily funded by publishers like Private Division, Adult Swim Games, and EA Originals. But as with mid-budget movies and mid-list authors, the funding for mid-market video games is drying up—including the higher end of the indie scale.
“The space between $2 million to $15 million has become very difficult for most developers,” says Doug North Cook, CEO and creative director at Creature, a publisher-developer hybrid that funded Sock Puppet Superstar, a VR singing game that keeps going viral on TikTok. “Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation, and publisher funding were propping that middle space up, but most publishers have pivoted toward much smaller budgets.”
