There are a couple of worrying developments surfacing this week thanks to a Bloomberg report about both Mike Morhaime’s Dreamhaven and Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street’s Fantastic Pixel Castle, as both studios are apparently under some financial thumbscrews.
The report first highlights an internal memo from Dreamhaven, which points out that the publisher’s sci-fi spaceship extraction title Wildgate has sold just 130K units across PC and console, while its other title, the couch co-op TTRPG-styled Sunderfolk, sold just 62K units.
This, in turn, portends dire times for Dreamhaven, according to a snippet from the report and the aforementioned memo:
“Our monthly expenses are outpacing revenue,” Morhaime wrote. The focus now is “urgently reducing costs,” he said, adding that “we are committed to Dreamhaven surviving through this.”
This week, Wildgate put out a note to players promising several updates to the game including the end of a premium reward track for its seasons, XP earnings from games against AI, and a free trial in the works, while the game is also offering a 34% discount on Steam.
As for Fantastic Pixel Castle and its still-developing MMORPG Project Ghost, the same report refers to insider sources that say that FPC is “at risk of losing funding” from its primary investor NetEase, while FPC is apparently attempting to trim down its reported $100M budget.
According to a statement from NetEase provided to Bloomberg, the outlet’s understanding of Ghost’s budget size is inaccurate, but the corporation is following “standard industry practice and [its] responsibility as a business to regularly assess the progress, viability, and potential success of all of [its] games and studios, and to make decisions based on those business considerations.”
While the statement doesn’t directly confirm or rebut that it’s reducing FPC’s funding, it’s something NetEase has done multiple times in recent memory, particularly for its western investments; the company culled the American devs supporting Marvel Rivals, pulled funding from indie Jar of Sparks, and rescinded funding from Jeff Strain-owned studios Crop Circle Games and Possibility Space, which in turn led to a $900M lawsuit filed by Strain that accused NetEase of spreading rumors that led to studio closures.
