No One Can Afford to Make ‘Myst’ Games Anymore
Cyan Worlds, creators of the iconic 1990s puzzle adventure Myst, produced a fully playable demo for a new entry called Anglerfish, featuring motion-captured performance by Red Dead Redemption 2 actor Noshir Dalal. Despite positive feedback during pitches to a dozen major publishers at industry conferences, the studio could not secure the $1–$10 million budget needed to complete development, forcing it to shelve the project and lay off half its staff.
The failed pitch reflects a broader crisis in video game funding. The industry traditionally operated across three tiers: massive triple-A productions exceeding $200 million, solo-developer micro-indie projects under $1 million, and a middle market in the $2–$15 million range. That middle tier has largely vanished as publishers have consolidated their strategy, shifting away from mid-budget bets toward either blockbuster gambles or minimal-cost experiments, leaving developers to either drastically reduce scope or close entirely.
In short
- Cyan Worlds failed to secure funding for new Myst game Anglerfish despite positive publisher reception, resulting in layoffs
- Video game industry's mid-budget tier ($2–15M) has collapsed as publishers focus on blockbusters or minimal-cost projects instead
- Remaining developers must drastically cut game scope or close operations entirely
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
The loss of the mid-budget tier represents a genuine threat to the industry's long-term health and cultural significance. This market segment historically nurtured creative risk-taking, allowed experimental design, and enabled smaller teams to produce artistically ambitious works without blockbuster franchise constraints—precisely the conditions that produced beloved, innovative titles that defined generations of gaming. The current bifurcation into massive franchises and minimal-cost indies leaves a void where thoughtful, well-resourced creative projects cannot survive, ultimately impoverishing the medium and eliminating pathways for emerging talent to develop with meaningful institutional support.
The case against
The consolidation toward blockbusters and indie development reflects rational market adaptation rather than systemic failure. Game production costs have risen substantially whilst the market remains finite; mid-budget titles historically faced challenging unit economics where production and marketing expenses approached blockbuster levels yet revenue potential remained modest, making them commercially risky for publicly traded companies with shareholder obligations. The current structure—blockbusters with strong IP and indie projects with lean operations—optimises capital efficiency and allows more projects overall to exist, simply not all at the mid-budget tier; developers necessarily adapt their scope to available funding, as happens across creative industries.
Explained simply
Myst is a puzzle adventure game made by Cyan Worlds and first released in the 1990s. Its success helped establish the studio, which later developed other games that ask players to explore detailed worlds and solve puzzles.
Video games are made at very different scales, from small projects by a handful of developers to blockbusters with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. Between those extremes, publishers once funded mid-sized games, but many have shifted towards the biggest releases or lower-cost projects.
That change can make it harder for established studios to fund games that need a modest team and budget but are too costly to make independently. It matters to developers deciding what they can afford to create, and to players who may see fewer games in that middle range.