A studio that turned a one-card-at-a-time swiping mechanic into one of indie gaming’s more durable franchises is calling it quits. Nerial, the French studio behind the Reigns series and Card Shark, announced it is ending active development after 13 years, according to Kotaku and Gematsu, with founders François and Tamara Alliot framing the move as the studio “entering hibernation mode” rather than a conventional closure.

Thirteen years, eleven games, one hibernation

The Alliots, a husband-and-wife co-CEO team, broke the news on Nerial’s own social channels with a characteristically self-aware opener — joking about “another one of those studio announcements with text on a somber background color” — before confirming that, after 13 years and 11 published games, Nerial and its partners at Devolver Digital have decided to end development at the studio and release its remaining staff. Devolver acquired Nerial in 2021, and the Reigns series alone has reportedly earned more than $20 million in lifetime revenue across five entries, making this a closure of a studio with a genuine commercial hit behind it, not just an unproven startup running out of runway.

This wasn’t a sudden collapse. Devolver cut 40% of Nerial’s workforce back in April 2025 as part of what it called a team restructuring, a move that in hindsight reads as the first stage of the same process this announcement now closes out.

Why the hits stopped landing

Reigns made Nerial’s name with a format built for mobile screens — swipe left or right to make royal decisions, no complex controls required — and the studio tried to extend that formula and its reputation with The Crush House, a reality-TV satire released in August 2024, and Card Shark, a cheating-themed card game set in 18th-century France. According to François Alliot, both of those follow-ups underperformed commercially compared to the Reigns series, pushing him to “step back and rethink” his approach to running an indie studio. Most recently, Nerial shipped Reigns: The Witcher in collaboration with CD Projekt Red on February 25, 2026 — a crossover that extended the original franchise’s life but arrived too late to change the studio’s broader trajectory.

Alliot was specific about what made the last couple of years harder than the ones before them: “It’s become a bit difficult to push forward, especially with the current context, with post-COVID, there’s a bit of this crash in the video game industry that everyone knows. AI sucking out all the air from the room.” The founders say the studio isn’t disappearing from games entirely — Alliot described wanting to “go back to our roots” rather than frame this as a retirement — but Nerial as an active development studio, with its current staff, is done.

A smaller-scale version of a familiar story

Nerial’s closure doesn’t carry the headline weight of a major publisher’s layoffs, but it’s a useful data point precisely because of that smaller scale. This was a studio with a proven, profitable franchise, a publisher partner in Devolver that had already invested in keeping it running, and multiple shipped follow-up titles — and none of that was enough to insulate it from the same post-COVID demand correction and AI-driven uncertainty that’s been cited across the industry’s bigger, more publicized collapses this year. It suggests the pressure indie studios are under isn’t only about weak sales or inexperienced teams; even developers who’ve already had a hit are finding it harder to justify betting a full studio’s overhead on the next unproven idea.

It’s also a reminder that “shut down” and “hibernation” aren’t always the same thing in practice for the people affected. Nerial’s statement draws a line between the studio’s legal existence and its ability to keep paying a development team, and for the staff being let go, that distinction matters less than the fact that Nerial, as an employer, is done for now.

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For more on how smaller and mid-size studios have been absorbing this year’s industry pressure, see our coverage of Dontnod’s financial crisis and threatened closure, or our look at the indie game boom’s winner-take-all economics for the broader trend behind stories like Nerial’s.