NetEase shuts down MMO studio led by former World of Warcraft veteran after two years

Fantastic Pixel Castle, an MMO studio owned by NetEase, formerly world of warcraft Greg Street, lead systems architect, will close on November 17th.

Street announced the studio's closing date in a post LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, Street said NetEase had withdrawn funding from the studio, but allowed it time to find a new publisher or raise funds for its fledgling massively multiplayer online role-playing game Ghost project.

These efforts have yet to bear fruit. Street said there's “still a chance” the studio can get the funding it needs and continue to survive, but that also depends on how many people on the current team choose to stay.

“While we'd love to make our own games, our first priority is helping our developers find jobs, whether at indie studio Fantastic Pixel Castle 2.0 or at many other great (and hopefully stable) gaming and tech companies,” Street said.

Fantastic Pixel Castle has recently hosted a number of content creators, giving the first public demonstration of Project Ghost gameplay. The game is still in its early stages, and Fantastic Pixel Castle is being quite transparent about its development process.

According to the studio, the studio feels that recent MMOs have been too focused on single-player adventures and are trying to emphasize playing with friends and building online communities. website. As for the gameplay of “Ghost”, it is a career-based MMORPG, divided into two different experiences: red shards and blue shards. The blue debris area will look more like a survival gamefriends can form a team to collect resources, build a base, and take adventures together. “Red Shards” provides a more classic MMORPG experience, where large groups of players can team up to fight world bosses or impact the game world in a permanent way.

Before forming Fantastic Pixel Castle, Street served as the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft at Blizzard for nearly six years, and later joined Riot Games. There, he held a number of different roles, the last of which was overseeing Riot's first MMO. He left Riot in 2023, and Riot announced about a year later Reset the League of Legends MMOafter several years of development, back to the drawing board.

The closure of Fantastic Pixel Castle is just the latest in a series of layoffs and studio closures in 2025, including Xbox slashes layoffs. NetEase made headlines earlier this year Marvel Rivals US development team fired Even though the game was a huge success. one Report It said at the time that the Chinese gaming giant was looking to scale back its overseas gaming operations due to “geopolitical risks” and “realigning its global strategy.”