Less than a month after warning that Fantastic Pixel Castle would "likely close" if it couldn't find a new publisher for its in-development MMO, studio head Greg Street says the worst has come to pass, and the studio will close its doors on November 17.
Street said in a message posted to LinkedIn that it's possible the studio will secure funding after that closure date, but "it will depend on how much of the team remains."
"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 wrote. He also thanked NetEase "for taking a chance on us."
Street was heading up development of the League of Legends MMO when he opted to leave Riot Games in 2023 and launch Fantastic Pixel Castle to develop an all-new MMO for NetEase called Ghost. Fantastic Pixel Castle was one of several veteran-led studios launched by NetEase in 2022 and 2023, but the company took a sharp turn away from that strategy in late 2024, shuttering Worlds Untold, Jar of Sparks, T-Minus Zero, and now Fantastic Pixel Castle, all within the span of a single year. None of the closed studios was able to launch a single game.
Sadly for Street's hope that Fantastic Pixel Castle employees will be able to find "stable" employment elsewhere, this sort of thing is not unique to NetEase. The past few years have seen thousands of game industry employees put out of work as studios of all sizes impose layoffs or close entirely, as the industry shifts away from the unsustainable excesses of the Covid-19 pandemic in favor of the unsustainable excesses of the AI bubble. October alone saw major layoffs at Amazon, Heart Machine, and Funcom, which also opted to close Metal: Hellsinger studio The Outsiders.
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