Fantastic Pixel Castle, the NetEase-owned MMO studio founded by former World of Warcraft lead system designer Greg Street, will shut down November 17.
Street announced the studio’s closure date in a post on LinkedIn. In weeks prior, Street stated NetEase had pulled funding from the studio but had allowed it time to seek out a new publisher or raise funding for their fledgling MMORPG, project Ghost.
Those efforts have not panned out. Street said “there is still a chance” the studio could secure needed funding and live on, but that it will also depend on how much of the current team will choose to remain should that happen.
“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 said.
Fantastic Pixel Castle had recently hosted a number of content creators to stream a first public look at project Ghost gameplay. The game was still in its early stages, with Fantastic Pixel Castle having been fairly transparent about its development process.
The studio believed recent MMOs have put too much of a focus on solo adventuring and sought to emphasize playing with friends and building an online community, according to the studio’s website. As for how Ghost would have played, it was a class-based MMORPG that was divided into two different experiences called Red and Blue Shards. Blue Shard areas would have played more like a survival game, where friends could party up to gather resources, build bases, and adventure together. Red Shards featured more classic MMORPG experiences, where large groups of players could team together to fight world bosses or impact the game’s world in permanent ways.
Before forming Fantastic Pixel Castle, Street served at Blizzard as a lead systems designer on WoW for nearly six years, later joining 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 about a year later Riot announced it was hitting reset on its League of Legends MMO, going back to the drawing board after several years of development.
Fantastic Pixel Castle’s closure is just the latest in a long line of layoffs and studio shutterings in 2025, including major layoffs at Xbox. Early this year, NetEase made headlines when it laid off Marvel Rivals US-based development team despite the game’s huge success. A report at the time indicated the Chinese-gaming giant was looking to scale back its overseas game business due to “geopolitical risks” and a “recalibration of its global strategy.”
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