Nerial, the studio behind the Reigns series and Card Shark, is closing after nearly 13 years as founder François Alliot steps back from running an internal team at Devolver Digital. The decision follows a 2025 restructure that already cut 40 percent of the staff after underperformance from titles like The Crush House, leaving a nine-person team that will now dissolve entirely. Alliot cited the post-COVID industry crunch, AI flooding Steam with clones, and the loss of pure indie focus after the 2021 acquisition as key factors pushing him toward solo or smaller-scale work.

Devolver retains rights to the full Nerial catalog, including the Reigns franchise that generated over $20 million across five titles, while Alliot keeps his prototypes and plans to revisit art-inspired projects after daily museum visits for inspiration. Seven staffers—artists, developers, producers, and writers including Helen O'Dell and Oscar Harrington-Shaw—are being let go, though Alliot hopes to collaborate with them as contractors later. The mutual shuttering ends Nerial's run as a salaried operation but leaves open the possibility of future Reigns or Card Shark sequels if Devolver comes calling.

Alliot described the current landscape as a "washing machine" spinning too fast for deliberate creation, where original ideas get copied in days, yet he insists he still has "things that I can say" as an independent voice. The closure lands amid broader Devolver headcount reductions from 303 to around 270 employees, part of a pattern hitting multiple internal studios. It marks the quiet end of one of the publisher's more distinctive creative cells, even as its most successful IP stays in the family.