Nagoshi Studio is dissolved, and the Gang of Dragon Steam page still says coming soon

The notice in the gazette

Nagoshi Studio Inc. no longer exists as a company. Japan's official gazette, Kanpo, ran the dissolution notice in its extra issue No. 240 on November 2, 2026, and Japanese outlet 4Gamer first reported the filing details. The notice records a resolution passed at a shareholders' meeting on October 31, 2026, and names Minoru Morinaga as the representative liquidator. The company address is listed as 6-8-1 Nishi-Shinjuku in Tokyo's Shinjuku ward.

The filing sticks to the legal minimum. It gives no reason for the dissolution and never mentions Gang of Dragon, the studio's only announced game. Creditors have two months from the day after publication to file claims, which puts the deadline in early January 2027. Claims filed after that window are excluded from the liquidation.

There was no press release, no farewell post, and no statement from Toshihiro Nagoshi or from NetEase, the Chinese publisher that owned the studio outright.

Five years, five dates

The studio went from the biggest founding in recent Japanese game development to a routine legal filing in exactly five years. Here is the record, with the source for each entry.

Date	What happened	Reported by
Nov 1, 2021	The company is registered in Tokyo, weeks after Nagoshi left Sega following more than 30 years there, most recently as chief creative officer and the head of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio	Company registry, as cited by KeenGamer
Jan 24, 2022	NetEase Games announces the studio as a wholly owned subsidiary with Nagoshi as CEO. The founding team includes longtime Yakuza producer Daisuke Sato, art director Kazuki Hosokawa, lead programmer Koichi Seto, Masao Shirosaki and Taichi Ushioda	NetEase announcement
Dec 11, 2025	Gang of Dragon gets its world premiere trailer at The Game Awards	The Game Awards 2025
March 2026	NetEase decides to stop funding the studio. A NetEase spokesperson confirms financing will end in May. Internal assessments put the remaining cost of finishing the game at about 7 billion yen, roughly $44.4 million. NetEase offers an exit clause: the studio can go independent and keep the game if a new investor reimburses what NetEase already spent and covers the completion budget. No backer is found. Commercial registry records show Nagoshi and the other directors step down effective March 31	Reported by Bloomberg
May 2026	The studio website goes offline and the YouTube channel with the reveal trailer disappears. The official X account has not posted since February. At least seven developers have left by May 31, some moving to Capcom, Lightspeed Japan and Mixi	Automaton, citing a Game*Spark review of LinkedIn profiles
Early Oct 2026	VGC reporter Andy Robinson says on the VGC Podcast that the studio is gone even though no announcement has been made, and that he has heard Nagoshi has recently been applying for jobs at other studios	VGC Podcast, via VGC's Andy Robinson
Oct 31 to Nov 2, 2026	Shareholders resolve to dissolve the company. The notice runs in Kanpo two days later	Kanpo extra issue No. 240, 4Gamer

Between the March funding cut and the gazette notice, the studio never published a single public statement about its own status. The silence itself became the story.

The Steam page outlived the company

We checked the Gang of Dragon store page on Steam on November 6, 2026, four days after the gazette notice ran. The page is still live. The release date still reads "Coming soon". The developer and publisher fields still say Nagoshi Studio Inc., a company that is now legally in liquidation.

The rest of the page is intact too. It lists PC as the only platform, nine supported languages with full English and Japanese voice acting, and a description of the game: a third-person action adventure set in the real Kabukicho district of Shinjuku, starring Korean actor Ma Dong-seok, known internationally as Don Lee from Train to Busan, The Roundup and Eternals, as Shin Ji-seong, a senior member of a Korean crime syndicate.

There is no price and no preorder option, so no player has paid money into a store page for a dissolved company. That limits the immediate harm. What remains is a stranger kind of gap: the legal record says the developer ended on October 31, and the store record still advertises a game from it with no date attached. PixelHerald notes that the support address on the page, [email protected], no longer resolves. Steam has said nothing about the listing, and nothing in its public rules commits it to taking down a page whose developer has folded.

NetEase is winding down its overseas bets

The dissolution is the sharpest end so far of a retreat that NetEase has been running for the past 18 months. The company closed Ouka Studios, the Tokyo team behind Visions of Mana, in late 2024, and has since shut or cut loose Fantastic Pixel Castle, Bad Brain, Worlds Untold and Jar of Sparks. Grasshopper Manufacture announced on September 30, 2026 that it was leaving NetEase to go independent again, which by the standards of this list counts as a good outcome. Pro-gamer.gg has reported that NetEase rights issues are also holding up Goichi Suda's Romeo Is a Dead Man, though that account comes from a single outlet.

The contrast with Nagoshi's former employer is hard to miss. Sega kept Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio funded and productive, shipped Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and has Stranger Than Heaven in development now. The series Nagoshi created is unaffected by any of this. It belongs to Sega.

What nobody has said

Gang of Dragon has never been formally canceled. No one with authority over it, whether NetEase, the liquidator, or Nagoshi himself, has said who controls the game's assets and brand, or whether anyone could buy the unfinished build and finish it. Bloomberg's reporting in March described NetEase's exit clause, which would have required a new investor to reimburse the money already spent on top of funding the remaining $44.4 million. No such investor ever appeared publicly, and no sale has been announced since.

Nagoshi's next move is equally unrecorded. A recent Famitsu feature introduced him without any mention of the studio, according to VG Times. The two-month creditor window means the liquidation cannot wrap up before early January 2027, so the next signal, if one comes, will probably be either a statement from NetEase, an edit to the Steam page, or news of an asset sale. Until one of those happens, the store page and the gazette notice will keep disagreeing with each other.