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.”
John Austin, founder of Pontoco (The Last Clockwinder), says many indie studios have responded by shrinking the scope of the games they pitch—or closing altogether. “Rather than going for mid-budget games, right now publishers are just pulling the slot machine a bunch of times and hoping they get another Balatro.” (Built by a single developer in his spare time, the deck-building roguelike Balatro became profitable within 60 minutes of its release and sold more than 5 million copies in its first year.)
So where did all the funding go?
“Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”
At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.” The loss of discoverability has made it even less likely for publishers to take a risk on a mid-budget game because of the additional marketing costs required to stand out from the crowd.
Another Myst-influenced game with a mid-market budget, 2019’s Outer Wilds, was bankrolled by a combination of crowdfunding and publisher investment. “The big publisher deals do feel like they’ve gone away, so you just have to look at more nontraditional routes,” says Masi Oka, founder of Outer Wilds developer Mobius Digital, over email. Oka points to game fund initiatives like Outersloth, Blue Ocean Games, and Midgame Fund as new and promising alternatives to the publisher deals of old—as long as your game isn’t too expensive.
Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Patreon have become another option for smaller indie studios, but they don’t often bring in more than $1 million. “I don't think people realize the true cost of developing games,” Anderson says, having used Kickstarter to partially fund two of Cyan’s past titles. “A million dollars seems like a ton of money, but it doesn't even come close to covering the full cost of a production like Anglerfish.”
Still, many indie developers are hopeful for the future. “The large corporations just want some sort of AI-generated entertainment solution that has nothing to do with us,” says North Cook. “But in the indie space, I’m much more optimistic about the quality of games and people in power now than at any other point in history.”
Ros says Myst and its first sequel Riven made “a profound impact” on his work, including Blue Prince, but he recognizes that the grand scale and cinematic realism of Myst games has become a steep ask in the current funding environment. “I'm going to keep my aspirations and scope rather small, because the last thing I want to do is put myself in a position where I have to make a deal that gives people power over me,” he says. “Giving up my loftier ambitions and making a smaller game is, to me at least, well worth that trade.”
At Cyan, development director Hannah Gamiel says that despite the Anglerfish setback, the studio is in good financial shape thanks to its back catalog of beloved games. It’s already working on another, smaller-scale game set in the Myst universe, codenamed Mudfish. “We’re going to see a lot more studio closures in the future as a result of this funding issue, but Cyan won’t be one of them.”
