Slitherine Buys Blood Bowl Rights From Distressed Nacon

British strategy specialist Slitherine has acquired the Blood Bowl video game franchise — its licence, publishing rights and back catalogue — from Nacon, the French publisher working through court-supervised insolvency. The deal, announced on July 1, 2026, is the first major piece of intellectual property carved out of Nacon since it sought protection from creditors, and it shows how a distressed publisher raises cash without shutting the lights off: sell the franchise, keep the studio that makes it.

Cyanide Studio, the Nanterre developer behind every Blood Bowl game since 2009, will keep building the series under a long-term development agreement. Slitherine is not buying the studio itself. “We aren’t taking an ownership stake in Cyanide, but we are securing a long term development deal with them,” Marco Minoli, Slitherine’s director of publishing, told GamesIndustry.biz, describing the purchase as a major investment for the company.

What Slitherine actually bought

Blood Bowl is a turn-based, deliberately brutal fantasy-football game set in the Warhammer universe — niche, but durable. Previous entries have sold close to a million units on Steam by GameDiscoverCo’s count. For Slitherine, whose catalogue already includes the Games Workshop-licensed Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector and Gladius, the purchase extends a run of catalogue buys and publishing deals across the strategy and tactics space.

The structure matters more than the undisclosed price. Nacon keeps Cyanide inside its corporate perimeter while offloading the IP and the cost of publishing it; Slitherine picks up the underlying licence from Games Workshop, the London-listed miniatures maker that invented Blood Bowl as a tabletop game in the 1980s and licenses its Warhammer settings to studios across the industry. That approach is why the brand outlives any one publisher’s troubles: Games Workshop already backs Sega’s Total War: Warhammer series and Slitherine’s own Warhammer 40,000 games, with a separate Total War: Warhammer 40,000 reportedly in development.

A publisher in reorganisation

Nacon’s troubles start one level up. Bigben Interactive, which owns 56.72% of Nacon, told the market on February 17, 2026 that its banks had refused to release funds it needed to make a partial repayment on a €43 million bond. Days later Nacon filed for insolvency, telling the Lille commercial court that its available assets could no longer cover its liabilities. The court opened judicial reorganisation, a French process that freezes pre-existing debt for an observation period of up to 18 months while the company drafts a recovery plan.

The damage spread to the studios. Cyanide, WRC developer Kylotonn, Greedfall maker Spiders and motion-capture unit Nacon Tech all filed for insolvency in late March 2026. On April 29, 2026 the court ordered the liquidation of Spiders, which closed with the loss of about 70 jobs, and Nacon Tech, while sending Cyanide and Kylotonn into restructuring.

The financials underline the squeeze. Nacon closed its 2025-2026 financial year with turnover of €160.8 million, down 4.3% and below its own forecasts, and flagged heavy writedowns on goodwill and on games it plans to abandon or shelve. Those impairments will land in the full-year results, now due on July 20, 2026 after a delay.

Why the sale makes sense

Selling Blood Bowl is a classic distressed-publisher move: raise cash from a saleable asset while protecting the payroll attached to it. The proceeds help fund Nacon’s recovery plan and, in the near term, help cover Cyanide’s wages while the studio stays under court supervision until at least September 30, 2026.

It also fits the wider unwinding of gaming’s acquisition era. Nacon spent the last decade buying studios on cheap debt — including Daedalic Entertainment for €53 million — a strategy that loaded its balance sheet with goodwill and left it exposed when financing tightened. Publishers from Square Enix to the studios profiled in our look at companies that clawed their way back from collapse have run the same playbook in reverse: shed IP and studios to survive.

What to watch

For players, the immediate question is the game itself. Blood Bowl 3 launched in 2023 to a lukewarm reception, and Cyanide’s planned relaunch — a free upgrade rebranded Warhammer Blood Bowl — was still unreleased when the licence changed hands. Slitherine says it will share more about the next Warhammer Blood Bowl on July 22, 2026 at its Slitherine Next showcase.

For the business, the Blood Bowl sale is unlikely to be the last carve-out. With a recovery plan due before the Lille court and impairments about to hit its accounts, Nacon has both the motive and the timeline to keep selling.