We’re sorry, the entire staff of indie publisher Annapurna Interactive quit? What?

The entire staff of indie game publisher (and site favorite) Annapurna Interactive has resigned. The entire staff — except the CEO of its parent company Annapurna Pictures. All of them. All of them.

You’ll have to excuse me. This is a little much to wrap my brain around — and as a fan of the games published by Annapurna Interactive, I’m pretty used to wrapping my brain around some bonkers concepts.

Annapurna Interactive was under the balloon of the larger Annapurna Pictures movie production company, and if you look at the creative output of both companies, the pairing makes a lot of sense as a brand. Annapurna Interactive is — was? is? — notable for producing a lot of deeply emotional, moving experiences that are a bit cerebral, and perhaps too odd or offbeat for the larger mainstream companies to take a chance on producing. Ditto for Annapurna Pictures. While different in aesthetic and plots, quirky, acclaimed movies like Her or Nightbitch have a lot in common with What Remains of Edith Finch or Kentucky Route Zero, games with narratives approached in innovative, unique ways. They’re not siblings, but they’re cousins.

As reported late last night by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, according to his inside sources, the CEO of parent company Annapurna Pictures Megan Ellison — he was careful to point out she is the daughter of billionaire cofounder of Oracle, Larry Ellison — was in talks with the CEO of Annapurna Interactive to spin off Interactive into its own discrete entity. When those talks fell through, the entire staff Annapurna Interactive quit en masse, from the top down. This leaves upcoming titles we’re excited about, like Wanderstop and Control 2, in the lurch. The role of a publisher is to do marketing, and handle things like licensing and distribution, but not the nuts-and-bolts work of coding or tuning or animation. Annapurna has said they will retain these projects and that they aren’t in limbo, which we can only hope is accurate for the developers’ sakes.

It should be noted that, though this is a well-known and well-respected indie publishing company, this is not on the scale of something like an Activision-Blizzard layoff. We don’t want to discount the uniqueness or severity of an entire company quitting all at once, but it’s a lot easier to organize 25 employees as a united front at the bargaining table as opposed to, say, the 650 people laid off by the Xbox Gaming division yesterday. But this collective action is still just as off-the-wall as some of the games they’ve produced in the past. We do hope that the unique indies like the ones Annapurna has published will still find their way to market — it’ll likely just be tougher to finding more games like these incredibly moving indie gems, unfortunately for us all.