Polyarc Shipped a Free Co-Op Update on September 3 and Said Goodbye on September 11

The closure is not the part that has stayed with me. Closures are the water this industry swims in now. It is the eight days in front of it.

September 3, September 9, September 11

On September 3 the studio shipped the free Play Together Update for Moss: The Forgotten Relic, adding two player local couch co-op. One person controls Quill. The other becomes the Reader, moving obstacles and helping with puzzles, which is a lovely piece of design when you remember that the Reader is who you were in the VR games. Six days after that, on September 9, Polyarc’s Bluesky account posted a link to a 20 percent discount on the same game. Two days later it was over.

That is not a team circling the drain in public. That is a team shipping.

The farewell went up on LinkedIn on September 11, and Gematsu quoted it in full. “After nearly 12 years riding the joyous rollercoaster of emotions that is making video games, our time together has come to an end,” it reads. “As we wind down active development, we are saying our farewells to each other.” Most of the rest of it is thanks, and a pointer to the people now looking for work.

What they actually made

Moss reached Steam on June 7, 2018. It is still there at $19.99, carrying 3,443 user reviews, 3,278 of them positive, which Steam rounds to Overwhelmingly Positive. Moss: Book II followed on October 20, 2022 and holds the same standing across 778 reviews. Steam lists the pair as Moss VR and Moss II VR now, which tells you something about the year on its own. Those are not the numbers of a studio that got the work wrong. They are the numbers of a studio that made two of the best liked things in the medium and could not turn that into a company that survives.

So they tried the obvious thing, and I want to be fair about how hard they tried it. Moss: The Forgotten Relic folds Moss, Book II and the Twilight Garden DLC into a single adventure built for a screen and a controller instead of a headset, co-developed with Blackbird Interactive and a developer post signed simply Danny went up to answer the question every VR player was already asking

“Expanding to include platforms beyond VR is both a way for us to share Quill’s story with more players and to help ensure we can keep making games for years to come,” he wrote. And, a few lines down: “VR is an important part of Polyarc’s story, and that hasn’t changed.”

Read that second sentence again with Friday in mind.