Moss developer Polyarc closes after project cancellation
Polyarc, the Seattle studio behind Moss, Moss: Book II and Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss, is closing after nearly 12 years in VR game development. The studio says active development is winding down following the cancellation of a major project earlier this year.
What's actually going on
Road to VR reports that Polyarc announced the closure in a LinkedIn message, thanking the people who worked at the studio and saying its work was finished. The announcement does not confirm the exact number of affected employees, although a reverse-recruiting spreadsheet mentioned by the outlet lists 29 people.
Polyarc was founded in 2015 by former Bungie developers and earned widespread praise for Moss, the 2018 VR puzzle-platformer starring the tiny mouse Quill. It followed that success with Moss: Book II in 2022 and the multiplayer battler Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss in 2025. In April, the studio said it had laid off two-thirds of its staff after a major project was cancelled.
The closure lands during a difficult period for the XR industry. Meta's Reality Labs has shifted priorities, while several established VR studios have also shut down or reduced operations. Polyarc's final release was Moss: The Forgotten Relic, a flatscreen version developed with Blackbird Interactive and released for consoles and PC in July.
Why you should care
Polyarc was one of VR's clearest examples of a studio turning a new medium's awkwardness into something warm, readable and genuinely inviting. Moss made room-scale VR feel less like a technology demonstration and more like a storybook you could reach into. Losing that expertise is a blow to a medium that still needs studios capable of making newcomers care.
Our opinion
This is a grim reminder that making beloved VR games is not the same thing as making a sustainable VR business. Polyarc gave the medium some of its most charming work, and it deserved a runway long enough to discover what came next. The hope now is that its people — and whatever ideas were trapped inside that cancelled project — find somewhere decent to land.