Unfortunately, we are here yet again with another games studio that will seemingly be closing its doors for good. A couple of years ago, Greg Street, known for his work on World of Warcraft and League of Legends, set up Fantastic Pixel Castle. There, it was announced at the time, he would lead development on an MMO codenamed Ghost, with NetEase serving as publisher. Except in a LinkedIn post earlier today, Street shared that Fantastic Pixel Castle will be shutting down.
“Fantastic Pixel Castle will close its doors on Nov 17,” Street wrote. “While there is still a chance we can secure funding after that date, 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.”
This latest closure, assuming that no one swoops in to save the day with presumably a few million dollars, is just the latest cut in a line of them from NetEase. The publishing giant kicked off the year by laying off a number of US-based devs working on Marvel Rivals, and in August they also shuttered T-Minus Zero Entertainment, a studio also founded two years ago by former BioWare developer and Star Wars: The Old Republic executive producer Rich Vogel, not to mention a number of other studios facing cuts or closures.
Not much was known about Ghost, and without a savior it might stay that way. It’s not the only unreleased MMO to be cancelled within the last week either, as Amazon recently did so with their Lord of the Rings MMO. Fingers crossed for all the devs at Fantastic Pixel Castle.
