Nagoshi Studio, the Tokyo developer that Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi founded under NetEase Games in 2021, no longer exists. The company was dissolved by a shareholders’ resolution on Oct. 31, according to a notice in Japan’s official government gazette, Kanpo, first spotted by Gematsu.
The closure ends months of uncertainty around the Shinjuku-based studio and its only announced project. Nagoshi Studio revealed Gang of Dragon in December 2025, an action adventure set in Tokyo’s Kabukicho nightlife district and starring South Korean actor Ma Dong-seok, known to Western audiences as Don Lee from Train to Busan and Marvel’s Eternals. At the time the studio described the game as deep into development.
Trouble surfaced in March, when Bloomberg reported that NetEase planned to stop funding the studio in May. According to that report, NetEase made the call after learning the game would need roughly ¥7 billion, or about $44 million, in additional money to finish. Staff were reportedly told the studio could go independent if it found a way to buy itself out. Video Games Chronicle notes that no such rescue was ever announced.
Neither Nagoshi nor NetEase has commented on the dissolution, and there is no word on whether Gang of Dragon could resurface somewhere else. Game rights and source code usually stay with whoever paid for them, so any revival would likely have to start with NetEase.
Nagoshi spent more than three decades at Sega, where he created the Yakuza series, now called Like a Dragon, and led the Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio before leaving in 2021. His move to NetEase was one of the biggest Japanese talent signings of that period, part of a wave of overseas studio investments the Chinese publisher has since been unwinding.
That retreat has already closed or cut loose a long list of teams, including Worlds Untold, Jar of Sparks, T-Minus Zero and Ouka Studio. Not every Japanese team went down with it: Suda51’s Grasshopper Manufacture split from NetEase and went independent in September, and Resident Evil producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi’s GPTRACK50 has also carried on without NetEase money.
For Nagoshi Studio, the gazette notice is the formal end. What happens to the people who worked there, and to a game that was shown to the public less than a year ago, is still unknown.
