In one of the fastest turn around times between a game releasing and its studio shutting down perhaps ever seen, developer Ouka Studios has reportedly been shuttered by parent company NetEase games just a day after their newest title, Visions of Mana, was released to the public.
This news regarding Ouka Studios was first detailed by Bloomberg‘s Takashi Mochizuki, who on August 29th reported that per his insider sources, “NetEase has cut all but a handful of jobs at its Ouka studio in Tokyo” ahead of their newly decided plans “to shut the Shibuya outfit”
“The few that remain will oversee the rollout of its final games, before the studio winds down,” noted Mochizuki.
Pressed on the news by the reporter, the Chinese-based NetEase informed him they had “nothing to announce” regarding the specific closure of Ouka Studios, instead choosing to provide him with a canned PR statement.
“In supporting studios outside China, we craft our strategy based on our goal of providing better gaming experiences to local and global players,” a NetEase spokesperson said to Mochizuki. “[We are] thus always making necessary adjustments to reflect market conditions.”
Notably, this announcement of Ouka Studios’ shut down comes just four years after it was first established.
Further, according to Mochizuki, it appears this move was made in response to both NetEase’s stagnating investments in various Japanese studios – in addition to Ouka Studios, their portfolio also includes Yakuza series creator’s eponymous Nagoshi Studio, SUDA51’s Grasshopper Manufacture, and former veteran Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi’s GPTRACK50 Studio – which, coupled with the recent success of Black Myth: Wukong, has reportedly led the parent company to consider putting more effort into their own homegrown productions.
At current, it is unknown which specific titles Ouka Studios still has yet to “rollout”.
However, in a 2022 interview with Japanese video game news outlet Famitsu, the studio revealed that they were working on a total of three games: “A single-player game that can be categorized as an action RPG”, “A new-style battle game based on a certain series with passionate fans,” and “A cooperative action game based on an original IP.”
While it’s possible that the “action RPG” could have been the Square Enix-published Visions of Mana – particularly with one of its developers’ suggestion that “as for the atmosphere, it is a game in which you’ll go on an adventure in cozy world” – this theory currently remains in the realm of speculation.
But regardless, since this initial tease of the their existence, absolutely no specific confirmation regarding these ‘mystery titles’ has ever been given by Ouka Stuios or NetEase Games (and given that the studio is now working with a skeleton crew, one wonders if anyone related to its current operations will ever revisit these teases).
