Moss studio Polyarc is shutting down just weeks after its final update

Polyarc announced the shutdown through LinkedIn on September 11, describing the moment as the end of an era and saying its team is now saying farewell.

The statement does not identify a specific reason for the final closure. It does point potential employers toward a list of Polyarc developers looking for their next positions.

GeekWire reports that 29 employees are affected, including co-founders Tam Armstrong, Chris Alderson and Danny Bulla.

The studio had already suffered a major collapse in March

Polyarc's financial trouble became public on March 31, when it announced a significant reduction in staff after a major project was canceled.

The company said an effort across the team to secure replacement funding had failed. UploadVR later reported, citing former Polyarc DevOps director Alex Holodak, that roughly two-thirds of the workforce had been laid off and that funding for the canceled project had disappeared in December 2025.

Polyarc initially continued operating with the smaller team. Less than six months later, that reduced operation has reached its endpoint.

Its last major release was supposed to take Moss beyond VR

Moss: The Forgotten Relic launched on July 16 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.

Rather than simply porting the original VR games, Polyarc and Blackbird Interactive combined Moss, Moss: Book II and Twilight Garden while rebuilding presentation and controls around conventional displays.

New cinematic camera systems were created to preserve the sense of scale and intimacy that originally depended on the player's physical presence in VR.

In May, Polyarc explicitly described reaching platforms beyond VR as a way to expose Quill's story to more people and help the studio continue making games for years to come.

Polyarc was shipping new content eight days ago

The Forgotten Relic received its free Play Together update on September 3. The update introduced local couch co-op, letting two players work through Quill's adventure together.

That makes the distance between active support and closure unusually short.

The game's Steam reception remains Very Positive, while Polyarc said before launch that The Forgotten Relic had crossed 100,000 wishlists. The studio also credited the broader Moss series with more than 160 awards and nominations over its lifetime.

Polyarc was built around the promise of immersive games

Founded in Seattle in 2015 by former Bungie developers, Polyarc began with an explicit focus on virtual and augmented reality.

Its first game, Moss, launched in 2018 and used VR for something more intimate than spectacle. Players controlled Quill while simultaneously existing inside the story as the Reader, directly manipulating parts of the environment and communicating with the tiny protagonist through physical presence.

Moss: Book II followed in 2022 and went on to win Best VR/AR Game at The Game Awards.

The studio later experimented with competitive multiplayer through Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss. Polyarc acknowledged in 2025 that sustaining a free-to-play title was particularly demanding for a small studio working across multiple projects.

The closure does not answer what happens to Quill

Polyarc's final statement does not explain the long-term ownership or future of the Moss property, nor does it announce that the franchise itself is ending.

There is therefore no basis yet for treating the studio closure as confirmation that another Moss project can never exist.

What Polyarc has confirmed is narrower and more immediate: active development at the company is finished. The Forgotten Relic, a project designed to open Moss to players who never owned a VR headset, now stands as its final release.