Yesterday, fans of the Yakuza games were sent into a panic when it was revealed that Nagoshi Studio, the studio started by series co-creator Toshihiro Nagoshi after he left Ryu Ga Gotoku to make spiritual successor Gang of Dragon, had seemingly deleted its YouTube channel amid greater concerns that parent company NetEase was preparing to pull funding.
But today, it…was back up?
The missing YouTube channel was discovered by fans posting to Reddit yesterday, who claimed that “the YouTube channel and Gang of Dragon trailer” were both gone. This claim was repeated by a number of others over the course of the day, leading to growing panic among fans that Nagoshi Studio was no more.
While there are certainly plenty of reasons to be worried about Nagoshi Studio and the timing of all this was concerning, the actual deletion of the channel was a little less dramatic than it seems on its face. For one, the Gang of Dragon trailer hasn’t been deleted. The official Gang of Dragon trailer version used by Nagoshi Studio in all its promotions is the one from The Game Awards 2025, where the game was announced. That trailer is still up. As far as I can tell from looking through Wayback Machine and through various news articles from the time, Nagoshi Studio never posted the trailer to its own channel, and thus never could have deleted it.
Additionally, this isn’t exactly a massively popular account with tons of videos. It only had a few hundred followers, and seemingly only had one video posted on it prior to deletion: an unlisted, 1:21 long…music video? that Nagoshi shared to Twitter and his studio’s website back in November of 2024. It being deleted wasn’t nothing, but it had more of the feel of an individual creator casually shutting down an unused account than a studio going dark.
As we celebrate our third anniversary as a studio on Nov 1st this year, we are excited to share our brand video “MAKE/HUMAN”, which expresses the identity we aim for. Here we go➝https://t.co/xSNsgDsz6h
Through this video, we would like to show our desire of being a studio that…
— 名越スタジオ Nagoshi Studio (@nagoshistudio) November 1, 2024
I began writing this story yesterday, at which point I confirmed the channel had indeed been taken down. However this morning, when I sat down to finish it, the channel was back up. There are still no listed videos on it, but you can watch the music video if you have the direct link. It’s like nothing ever happened.
What does this mean? No idea. Neither Nagoshi Studio nor NetEase returned Kotaku‘s request for comment. Maybe it got banned erroneously, maybe someone took it down accidentally, who knows? Honestly, this all probably would have flown under the radar if Nagoshi Studio wasn’t already in a whole heap of trouble. Last February, it was reported that NetEase was pulling out of a number of its recent gaming investments, with Bloomberg stating at the time that Nagoshi Studio had been “given time to wrap up ongoing projects.” Then, just this past March, Bloomberg reported that NetEase was done giving Nagoshi Studio money, despite Nagoshi seeking $44.4 million more to finish Gang of Dragon. Bloomberg suggested that NetEase may simply cut Nagoshi Studio loose to fend for itself, leaving it on the hunt for more third-party funding elsewhere. Given all this, it’s not shocking that a ripple of panic hit the community when the YouTube channel briefly went down. With the studio already in danger, official pages going down certainly seem like a portent of doom.
For now though, at least until told otherwise, Gang of Dragon is…well, probably as fine as it was two days ago. Which is to say not very, but we can still hold out hope that someone will swoop in and save the Yakuza successor before it’s totally knocked out.
