Yakuza Creator Toshihiro Nagoshi's Studio Closes Before Its First Game

NetEase cut funding after learning Gang of Dragon still needed ¥7 billion to finish, a report says.

The Yakuza games Toshihiro Nagoshi created kept returning to Kamurocho, a made-up stand-in for Tokyo's Kabukicho. The trailer for his new studio's first game appeared to be set in the real district.

That studio is gone. Nagoshi Studio has officially closed, Video Games Chronicle reported Monday, after its name appeared among the company dissolutions listed in Kanpo, Japan's official gazette. Its debut, Gang of Dragon, never came out.

NetEase spent years paying for new studios around the world, and now it's cutting that spending hard. Worlds Untold in Vancouver and Jar of Sparks in Seattle had already lost NetEase's backing before Nagoshi's shop went under, VGC reported. Not everyone folded: Goichi Suda's Grasshopper Manufacture kept making games without NetEase's money.

For Nagoshi, the break came in March. Citing an earlier Bloomberg report, VGC says employees were told then that NetEase planned to stop funding the game, reportedly after the publisher found it would take another ¥7 billion, about $44.4 million, to finish.

The studio, founded in 2021, had revealed Gang of Dragon in December, billed as "deep into development." Its star was Ma Dong-seok, the actor from Train to Busan and Marvel's Eternals, and VGC thought it looked like a more realistic cousin of Like a Dragon.

In 2023, in the studio's first Western interview, Nagoshi said through a translator that his fans would get his personality in whatever came next. "I will not betray my fans," he told VGC.

Source: videogameschronicle.com, retrieved November 2, 2026. Other sources: videogameschronicle.com (2).