It’s been almost two weeks since we shipped our remake of Riven here at Cyan Worlds, and I’m finally taking some time to rest and reflect on what our team has been able to accomplish for this release.

I’ll have more to say about it all at a later date, but I wanted to come out and say that I am – most of all – so very proud of what the team here at built with the relatively small amount of resources we have compared to other companies held to similar standards.

It has felt amazing to see the wildly positive reactions and reviews coming out in support of our release of Riven, but the most incredible part about it all is how many people assume we are (or hold us to the standards of) a AAA studio based on what we were able to ship.

The ironic part about this assumption is that Riven’s total budget was ***less than 2%*** of what most popular AAA game studios are able to work with nowadays for a release.

People see the level of fidelity we shipped in Riven, especially in our Windows/Mac release, and are elated – or disappointed – when it either manages or fails to meet their standards for other titles they’ve played with hundreds of millions or dollars more in budget than we had.

This is both incredibly flattering and terrifying at the same time. ?

Our character team on Riven was composed of one (1!!!!!!!) person for most of the project. We had about five programmers for the last year of the project – and only one before that – making sure the game supported both 2D **and** VR gameplay (because we are insane).

We had about 10 artists working on Riven for the very last year of the project, but before then we only had two or three helping greybox the world.

Riven’s extremely positive reception is a testament to the kind of team we’ve managed to build here at Cyan. We’re a small team of very, VERY passionate and talented people whose whole goal is to deliver games that both challenge and mean something to people.

Many of the folks here at Cyan Worlds have been here for over 15, 20 years. Some even longer. Some folks are much newer to the team but have been huge fans of our games for almost their entire lives.

We love what we do, and we want to keep doing it for many years to come. We love (and sometimes hate) that we are somehow being held to such high standards, even if it is absolutely terrifying considering the very much NOT AAA-level resources we have to make it happen.

As head-scratching as all of that is for us as a team… we must be doing something right when people expect only the best from us.

All in all, thank you to everyone for believing in us, and for your support with this release of the remake of Riven. We’re immensely thankful for every single person who has bought and reviewed Riven so far.

Here’s to the hope that we can keep doing this for many years to come, and thank you for letting us bring this incredible remake of Riven to life.