NetEase is apparently dumping another American games studio, this time pretty close to home for MMORPG fans: Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street announced last night that NetEase is no longer funding Fantastic Pixel Castle and its MMORPG, Project Ghost.
“I wanted to share the news that Fantastic Pixel Castle’s time as a first party studio within NetEase Games is coming to an end,” he wrote on Twitter. “NetEase Games has been very gracious and supportive of looking for another publisher for our game. However, in the current market environment very few deals are getting made for any game, let alone something on the scale of an MMORPG.”
“We’re doing everything we can to find a publisher or investor. At the same time, we’re encouraging our team members to explore future opportunities and supporting them through the uncertainty. If we’re unable to find a publisher soon, the reality is that the studio would likely close, and the entire team, leadership included, would be affected. We want to thank the Ghost community, our playtesters, and the literally hundreds of people who have given us advice on how to find funding in this absurdly challenging time for our industry. I hope you all will have a chance to play Ghost. I also want to thank the FPC team who has made a game that we all should be proud of. I know it’s cliche to say this, but demonstrably this is the best team I have ever worked with. We are rigorous in collecting data, and the data on our team morale and performance is higher than I have ever seen. Despite the challenges, the past two years have been the most satisfying of my career.”
It’s not going to be a major surprise to longtime readers as we’ve been covering NetEase’s obvious retreat from western investments; just this past summer, the company cut loose Rich Vogel’s T-Minus Zero, too. We’d been worried about Project Ghost for a while, and in fact back in February Street openly said that NetEase had “evaluated [FPC’s] portfolio and decided [Ghost] is one they want to focus on.” However, in recent months, MMO gamers had been watching nervously as Street pushed the game into an extremely early test phase with influencers for unclear reasons.
We note again that NetEase’s retreat doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the projected quality or revenue from the games, given that many of the games being canned across the industry right now had strong internal polling, so it’s certainly possible that Ghost will be picked up… if only anyone had money to do it.
Obviously not an outcome any MMORPG would want. Condolences to the affected developers.