Nagoshi Studio is officially dissolved, leaving the Yakuza creator's Gang of Dragon without a home

By PPRGaming · November 2, 2026

Ma Dong-seok's in-game character in a dark suit and open-collared white shirt, standing under a lit archway on a street lined with Japanese signs, from the Gang of Dragon reveal trailer
Image: Nagoshi Studio / The Game Awards, via VGC

The studio Toshihiro Nagoshi built after leaving Sega is gone. Nagoshi Studio, the Tokyo team NetEase Games set up around the creator of the Yakuza series, was dissolved by a shareholders’ resolution on October 31, according to a notice in Japan’s official government gazette, Kanpo. Gematsu spotted the listing, and VGC says it ends months of speculation about the studio’s future.

What the notice says

The dissolution notice ran in the November 2 extra edition of the gazette, issue No. 240. As Gaming.net reports, it names Minoru Morinaga as the representative liquidator, lists the company’s Nishi-Shinjuku address, and gives anyone with a claim against the company two months to file it. That’s a formal wind-down, not a pause or a rebrand.

NetEase announced Nagoshi Studio in January 2022 as a wholly owned subsidiary focused on high-end console games for a worldwide audience, with Nagoshi as CEO and a team of experienced developers behind him.

How Gang of Dragon got here

The studio’s first and only announced game was Gang of Dragon, revealed at The Game Awards in December 2025. It’s a Kabukicho-set action adventure starring Korean actor Ma Dong-seok (Don Lee), and VGC notes it was described as “deep into development” at the time.

Things turned fast. In March 2026, Bloomberg reported that NetEase would stop funding the studio. According to Anime News Network, NetEase made that call after finding the game would need about another ¥7 billion (roughly $44 million) to finish. Gematsu adds that the studio had the option to go independent if it could pay its own way out. The gazette notice makes clear that didn’t happen in time.

It’s also part of a bigger pattern. VGC points out that NetEase has been pulling back hard on its international game development, closing T-Minus, FPC and Bad Brain, splitting from Mac Walters’ Worlds Untold and Jerry Hook’s Jar of Sparks, and closing Ouka Studio in 2024. A few Japanese teams, like Suda51’s Grasshopper Manufacture and Hiroyuki Kobayashi’s GPTRACK50, have kept going without NetEase money.

PPR take: Rough news, and not a surprise after the funding was pulled in March, but it still stings. Nagoshi’s name is on some of the most loved crime dramas in gaming, and a Kabukicho brawler starring Don Lee was about as easy a sell as it gets. What none of the reports say is what happens to Gang of Dragon itself. A dissolved studio doesn’t automatically mean the game is dead, but nobody has said who owns it now or whether anyone plans to pick it up, so we’re not going to guess. The bigger worry is the trend. NetEase spent years funding big-name creators to start fresh studios, and now it’s shutting the doors one after another. For the people who worked there, that’s the part that matters most, and our thoughts are with them.

Sources