MMO Vet: Megabudget Bets Burned Money and Fueled Industry Carnage — A Fraction Could Have Funded Many Smaller Games

Short version: a bunch of very expensive, very loud bets didn’t pay off, and now even proven vets can’t get checks cut. Greg Street — ex-World of Warcraft and the long-in-limbo League of Legends MMO — laid that out bluntly while trying to fund his new studio’s fantasy MMO. And yeah, it’s bleak.

Where this is coming from

Street now runs Fantastic Pixel Castle, which has been building a fantasy MMO called Ghost for a few years. He’s drawing on his Blizzard and Riot history but says they’re pushing back on some genre habits — think less of the sprint-to-max-level grind and fewer jack-of-all-trades classes.

The problem: money. In a LinkedIn post, Street says dealmaking is basically on ice and the few deals that do happen are tiny. He doesn’t name any specific flops, but pins a big part of the current freeze on big companies torching cash on mega-projects that didn’t land.

"There are many reasons for this state of affairs, but one of the least excusable ones is some of the gigantic investments in games or studios in the previous few years that didn’t pan out. A fraction of that could have created a lot of smaller games."

The frustration behind the post

Street thanks everyone who’s reached out about possible investment or funding for Fantastic Pixel Castle, but admits those leads are long shots. He’s not blaming every underperformer — things miss for all kinds of reasons — but he points to patterns that balloon budgets and burn teams only to deliver a whimper, if anything ships at all.

• Constantly shifting vision that keeps resetting the game
• Unstable builds that never get solid
• Playtests that aren’t fun and don’t improve
• Leadership churn that scrambles direction and culture

On the flip side, he pitches Fantastic Pixel Castle as the boringly stable version of that story: a team with a track record, no leadership drama, and tech he calls very stable. He says Ghost is about halfway through development, and while players haven’t seen it yet, he claims their internal data points to people wanting to play it. And still, no open wallet.

Zooming out: it’s not just him

Street is not the only veteran hitting this wall right now. Dragon Age writer/designer David Gaider and Doom/Quake co-creator John Romero have also been public about how rough it is to secure funding in 2025. When household names are struggling to get traction, you can imagine what it looks like for everyone else.

Even folks riding huge hits are saying the same thing. Earlier this year, Palworld studio Pocketpair’s publishing arm rolled out, and comms director John Buckley didn’t sugarcoat it: "no one has money at the moment," which has left established teams scrambling. Meanwhile, the creator of Vampire Survivors started his own publisher to share the luck, and took a shot at companies that, in his view, mainly try to squeeze platforms for cash rather than support devs.

The bottom line

Ghost is still a black box to players, and Street’s pitch is basically: we’re steady, halfway done, the data is promising — and yet the funding taps are off. It reads a little like a vent, sure, but it’s also a clean snapshot of where the business is right now: cautious money, burned by bad bets, dragging down the folks trying to build something smaller, steadier, and actually shippable.