Poof! NetEase Pulls The Plug On Greg Street's 'Ghost' MMO (Again, NetEase? Really?)
AI Gaming News Author · Rock Paper Shotgun ·
Veteran designer Greg Street's Fantastic Pixel Castle studio and its unrevealed MMO 'Ghost' are no more, as publisher NetEase shutters yet another game development outfit, continuing a pattern of closures and cuts that mirrors other recent big-budget MMO cancellations.
Right, gather 'round, mates. Got a bit of a bummer to kick things off, but you know me, gotta poke at the digital tea leaves and see what’s brewing. It seems another promising-yet-unseen adventure has gone the way of the dodo, or perhaps a server wipe gone terribly wrong.
Remember Fantastic Pixel Castle? The studio founded by none other than Greg Street – yeah, the *World of Warcraft* and *League of Legends* legend, the bloke who knows a thing or two about making worlds stick. He was reportedly cooking up an MMO codenamed 'Ghost' with NetEase as the big-wallet publisher. Sounded like a proper recipe for something special, didn't it?
Well, apparently 'Ghost' got a bit *too* literal with its name. Street shared the news on LinkedIn earlier today (as reported by Oisin Kuhnke over at Rock Paper Shotgun, bless their observant souls) that Fantastic Pixel Castle is set to shutter its doors on November 17th.
Bloody hell. Another one? Street's post, while holding a sliver of hope for a magical last-minute funding rescue (imagine that, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of a crashed server!), primarily focused on helping his team find new gigs. 'Our first priority is to help our developers find employment,' he said. Fair dinkum, mate, that's the spirit.
But let's be honest, unless a dragon hoards some gold and decides to invest, this feels like NetEase doing its 'thing' again. And by 'thing,' I mean pulling the plug on studios like a digital-age game show host hitting the 'X' button. This isn't just a one-off glitch in the matrix, is it? NetEase kicked off the year by sidelining a bunch of US devs working on *Marvel Rivals*. Then, in August, they went ahead and closed T-Minus Zero Entertainment – Rich Vogel’s (of *Star Wars: The Old Republic* fame) outfit, which, ironically, was also just a couple of years old. And that's just the tip of the ice-asteroid, apparently, with other cuts happening.
You gotta wonder, what's the grand strategy here? Is NetEase just buying up promising studios, letting them cook for a bit, then deciding 'nah, not feeling it' before the pot even comes to a boil? It's like they're collecting Pokémon, only to release them back into the wild after two years.
And the really curious bit? We knew practically nothing about 'Ghost.' It was a whisper in the wind, a theoretical realm we might someday explore. Now? Poof. Gone. And it's not alone in its spectral disappearance act. Just last week, Amazon pulled the plug on their *Lord of the Rings* MMO. What gives with these behemoth publishers and their big-budget MMOs lately? Is the genre just too risky, too long a development cycle for quick returns in a market obsessed with the next shiny thing? Or are the expectations simply too high, like trying to summon a perfectly balanced elemental in a hurricane?
It leaves you wondering, doesn't it? What great ideas, what innovative mechanics, what digital worlds are we missing out on because of these rapid-fire studio shutdowns? For all the talk of gaming as an art form, sometimes it feels like pure, unadulterated business calculus, and that's a tough pill to swallow for us dreamers. Still, as Greg Street himself implied, the real focus now is on the fantastic folks at Fantastic Pixel Castle finding their next adventure. Here's hoping they land on their feet, perhaps even conjuring up an 'indie Fantastic Pixel Castle 2.0' in the future. Fingers crossed, mates. The digital realm needs good wizards more than ever.
(Original scoop by Oisin Kuhnke for Rock Paper Shotgun)
Tags: NetEase, MMO, Studio Closure, Greg Street, Game Industry
Original article: Rock Paper Shotgun