Nagoshi Studio website vanishes as Gang of Dragon funding crisis deepens

Nagoshi Studio’s website went dark on May 12, and the silence landed like another bad sign for a studio already rattled by NetEase’s retreat. The official Steam page for Gang of Dragon was still live, but the missing site made the project feel less like a normal delay and more like a team running out of public runway.

The disappearance matters because Nagoshi Studio had already shown warning lights. Its YouTube channel briefly vanished in April, then came back within hours, a hiccup that could be shrugged off once. A missing website is harder to dismiss, especially with no official explanation from the studio and no public statement about the status of Gang of Dragon.

This is the latest turn in a longer slide. NetEase announced Nagoshi Studio on January 24, 2022 as a wholly owned subsidiary focused on high-end console titles for worldwide release, giving Toshihiro Nagoshi a high-profile landing spot after he left Sega in 2021 following roughly 30 years there. By early March 2026, that backing was already being wound down. Employees were told on March 6, and NetEase said it would stop financing the studio from May as part of a broader pullback from external game development. Reports said Nagoshi Studio could keep its assets and brand only if it paid its way out.

The funding gap at the center of the story was enormous. Gang of Dragon was reportedly short by ¥7 billion, about $44.4 million, before completion, and Nagoshi was said to be looking for another backer after NetEase pulled away. That search had not turned up a replacement in the March reporting cited, leaving the project suspended between a reveal and a future it could not yet afford.

Gang of Dragon itself looked built for attention when it debuted at The Game Awards 2025. Nagoshi Studio described it as an action-adventure game set in Kabukicho, Shinjuku, with Ma Dong-seok playing Shin Ji-seong, a high-ranking member of a Korean crime syndicate. That pitch still exists on Steam, but the vanishing website and earlier YouTube scare now frame the game as a project whose public presence is thinning just as its finances come under the harshest light.