Publisher NetEase is making more cuts to its internal development teams, including shutting Fantastic Pixel Castle, according to studio head and game director Greg Street. Fantastic Pixel Castle was founded in 2023 and led by Street, an influential designer on both World of Warcraft at Blizzard and League of Legends at Riot Games.
Fantastic Pixel Castle is developing an original fantasy massively multiplayer game codenamed Ghost.
News of Fantastic Pixel Castle’s imminent closure comes just weeks after Street announced that his studio’s “time as a first-party studio within NetEase Games is coming to an end” and that the team was looking for new financial backing.
Street said there’s “still a chance we can secure funding” after Fantastic Pixel Castle’s planned closure on Nov. 17, but previously noted the difficulty of finding a backer for a large-scale MMO.
“While there is still a chance we can secure funding after that date, it will depend on how much of the team remains,” Street said on LinkedIn. “While we’d love to make our game, our first priority is to help our developers find employment, whether that’s at indie studio Fantastic Pixel Castle 2.0, or at many of the other fine (and hopefully stable) game and tech companies out there.”
Street was known to the World of Warcraft community by his screen name Ghostcrawler, and he worked as a lead systems designer at Blizzard between 2008 and 2013, when the game was at the height of its popularity. After Blizzard, he joined Riot Games to work on League and, later, an untitled in-development MMO set in the world of League of Legends. Street left his executive role at Riot in 2023.
NetEase’s closure of Fantastic Pixel Castle follows a raft of the publisher’s withdrawal from studios outside of China. That includes affected studios Worlds Untold, the Vancouver-based developer led by ex-BioWare creative Mac Walters; Jar of Sparks, the Seattle-based studio founded in 2022 by Xbox veteran Jerry Hook; and Ouka Studio, the Tokyo-based developer of Visions of Mana for Square Enix.
In February, Street sounded confident that his studio would escape NetEase’s cuts, telling Polygon, “I feel like we are in a stronger position now because NetEase has clearly been evaluating their portfolio and decided our game is one they want to focus on.”
On LinkedIn, Street thanked “our supporters at NetEase” and “the literally dozens of people who reached out trying to help us raise capital.”
“There is still a chance one of them works out, and it really only takes one,” he said.
