The news about the shutdown of Fantastic Pixel Castle has been confirmed by the community manager through a message posted on the company’s website. The news was first announced by the studio head, Greg Street, through an emotional post on LinkedIn.
“A few weeks ago, we announced that we are parting ways with our publisher NetEase, effectively closing at least this chapter of our studio on November 17th,” read the message from the community manager. “Since then, we have been touched and overwhelmed by the messages of support we have received from our community – both amongst people who make games, and people who just like to play games.”
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“First things first: We are still 100% focused on finding new funding to make our game. Even if the state of the industry feels fairly dire we’re encouraged by the conversations we’ve been having and fortunate that we have a great playable demo already! So there is still some hope to be had – hold onto that hope because now we’re going to get kinda real.
It is an unfortunate truth of any creative industry that most projects fail. This is especially true in games: Most games do not make it to the finish line, and most games that do launch still fail. So many fascinating, interesting games with potential are pitched, even partway developed, and then pulled for a myriad of complicated reasons. Nearly always, that means players never see any of the project.
But we’ve been showing you our game at every step already, and we aren’t stopping now. Our transparency has helped us so far in our search for a new publisher or investors. Even at this early stage, we can show there’s a large enough audience of players excited about what we’re building, which makes our game a much better bet to fund.”
While November 17 has been set as the last day of the studio’s operations, things may change if they can find an investor to fund the game they are building. In the next few weeks, the studio has promised to share videos, art, posts, and anything else.
Fantastic Pixel Castle’s funding struggles
Two weeks ago, Street posted on LinkedIn, where he shared Fantastic Pixel Castle’s struggle with finding investors to fund their game. The lack of funding in the video game industry is partly blamed on offshoring and outsourcing.
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“I understand that almost nobody in the video game business is making deals right now, and those that do happen are very small,” Street wrote at that time. “There are many reasons for this state of affairs, but one of the least excusable ones is some of the gigantic investments in games or studios in the previous few years that didn’t pan out. A fraction of that could have created a lot of smaller games.”
“I’m not blaming every game that didn’t hit big – making games is very hard after all. But when you hear about projects where the team was burning money because the game vision kept changing, or the build was never stable, or playtests just weren’t fun, or the leadership team was a revolving door, then you know that game was unlikely to ever deliver a good experience for players.”
Fantastic Pixel Castle was founded in 2023 to create a modernized fantasy MMORPG. They were working on a game codenamed Ghost when NetEase pulled funding. According to their official website, Fantastic Pixel Castle had 29 employees, and the studio was fully remote.
How do you feel about the shuttering of Fantastic Pixel Castle, even before their first game was shipped? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
