By Remarkable Pixel Castle, the MMO studio owned by NetEase and established by former World of Warcraft lead system architect Greg Street, will close its doors on November 17.
Street revealed the studio’s termination date in a message on LinkedIn. In previous weeks, Street mentioned that NetEase had withdrawn financial support from the studio but had permitted some time to look for a new publisher or obtain funding for their nascent MMORPG, project Ghost.
These attempts have not been successful. Street mentioned that “there is still a possibility” the studio could attract the necessary funding and continue, but that would also hinge on how many of the existing team decide to stay if that occurs.
“While we would like to create our game, our primary concern is to assist our developers in finding new jobs, whether that is at indie studio Remarkable Pixel Castle 2.0, or at various other reputable (and hopefully stable) gaming and tech firms,” Street stated.
Remarkable Pixel Castle had recently invited several content creators to showcase a first public glimpse of project Ghost gameplay. The game was still in its initial phases, with Remarkable Pixel Castle being quite open about its development journey.
The studio believed that contemporary MMOs focus too heavily on individual exploration and aimed to highlight collaboration with friends and the formation of an online community, as per the studio’s website. In terms of how Ghost would have functioned, it was a class-based MMORPG divided into two distinct experiences called Red and Blue Shards. Blue Shard regions would have operated more like a survival title, where friends could team up to collect resources, construct bases, and explore together. Red Shards provided more traditional MMORPG experiences, where large groups of players could collaborate to battle world bosses or permanently affect the game world.
Prior to creating Remarkable Pixel Castle, Street worked at Blizzard as a lead systems architect on WoW for nearly six years, subsequently joining Riot Games. There, he undertook various roles, the last being overseeing Riot’s initial MMO. He departed Riot in 2023, and about a year later, Riot announced it was resetting its League of Legends MMO, returning to the drawing board after several years of development.
The closure of Remarkable Pixel Castle is merely the latest in a lengthy series of staff reductions and studio closures in 2025, including major staff cuts at Xbox. Earlier this year, NetEase garnered attention when it terminated the Marvel Rivals US-based development team despite the game’s significant success. A report at that time indicated the Chinese gaming behemoth was looking to scale down its overseas game operations due to “geopolitical risks” and a “reassessment of its global strategy.”
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