Nagoshi Studio, the Tokyo developer that Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi set up with NetEase Games money in 2021, no longer exists. A notice in today's edition of Kanpo, the Japanese government's official gazette, records that the company was dissolved by a resolution of its shareholders on October 31. That leaves GANG OF DRAGON, the Shinjuku crime action game the studio unveiled last December, with no developer behind it and no word on what happens next.
What the gazette notice says
Kanpo is where Japanese companies are legally required to publish corporate events such as dissolutions, and the November 2 extra edition lists Nagoshi Studio among them. The notice is a formality, but a final one: the shareholders, in practice NetEase, voted to wind the company up as of the last day of October. Neither Nagoshi Studio nor NetEase has put out a statement alongside it, and the studio has not said how many people were still on staff when the doors closed.
The closure is not a complete surprise. In March it emerged that NetEase planned to stop funding the studio in May, reportedly because finishing the game would have needed far more money than the publisher was willing to spend. At the time there was talk of the team trying to buy its way out and carry on independently. Today's notice suggests no such deal happened, or at least that it did not happen in time to save the company in its current form.
The game that never got a date
GANG OF DRAGON was announced in December 2025 as Nagoshi Studio's first game: an action adventure set on the streets of Shinjuku, including the Kabukicho entertainment district, starring Korean actor Ma Dong-seok (known internationally as Don Lee) as a man named Shin Ji-seong. Its Steam page, published by Nagoshi Studio itself, describes heated human drama across the district, and it is still live this evening, listed only as "Coming soon" with no release date.
For anyone who has played a Yakuza or Like a Dragon game, the official screenshots look familiar on purpose. The hero brawls in a dark suit, there is a health bar and a special-move gauge in the corner, and the minimap tracks a dense, walkable slice of Tokyo. But GANG OF DRAGON also leaned harder into firearms than Nagoshi's old series ever did, with pistols, grenades and even a mounted minigun in the store images, and it had a car garage where you could tune, dress up and arm your vehicle.
Who Toshihiro Nagoshi is
Nagoshi spent three decades at Sega. He worked on arcade racers such as Daytona USA, created Super Monkey Ball, and as head of the Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio oversaw the Yakuza series from its 2005 debut through a string of sequels, spin-offs and the Judgment games. He left Sega in 2021 and was quickly confirmed as the head of a new studio funded by NetEase, part of a wave of Japanese and Western developers the Chinese publisher bankrolled during a period of rapid overseas expansion.
That expansion has since gone into reverse. Over the past couple of years NetEase has closed or cut loose a long list of studios outside China, including teams in North America and Europe that, like Nagoshi Studio, had been founded by well-known veterans and had not yet shipped a game. Nagoshi Studio was one of the most prominent bets in that group, because of both its founder's track record and the star power of its lead actor.
What happens to GANG OF DRAGON now
Nobody has said. A dissolved company cannot release a game, so if GANG OF DRAGON is to come out, the rights and the work in progress would have to end up somewhere else, with NetEase or with a new owner. There has been no announcement of either. The Steam page is the only public sign the project is still on the books, and pages like that often outlive the plans behind them.
Nagoshi himself has not commented publicly on the closure. When the studio started, he promised fans of his earlier games that its first release would be something they would enjoy. Unless someone picks the project up, that promise ends here, and one of the more intriguing Japanese action games of the last few years becomes a Steam page and a handful of screenshots.
