The cancelation of The Last of Us Online was reportedly not a “bloodless” affair, with punishments reportedly handed out at Sony.
Appearing on the Friends Per Second podcast, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier discussed the recent Bungie layoffs and expressed his personal concerns around the studio’s next project, extraction shooter Marathon, as well as the fact that “the sentiment I’ve heard is not great around it.” From there, the topic turned to Sony’s live service push, which saw the company announce that it had a dozen such projects in the works.
That’s a strategy that Schreier denounced as “trend-chasing to the extreme,” decrying the “very, very long” list of games that were “pivots from single-player studios […] that turned out to be debacles.” Faced with the suggestion that Sony was hedging its bets in an attempt to find the next smash hit that could help sustain it for years to come, however, Schreier said that would be a prohibitively expensive strategy, pointing to last year’s cancelation of The Last of Us Online.
“Naughty Dog‘s Factions game was in development for something like four years, with a team in the hundreds” Schreier says, referring to the game by the name of its predecessor’s multiplayer mode. “That is an expensive proposition for something that was a miss. And that project, that getting canceled was not a bloodless endeavour. There were some heads rolling at Sony as a result of that one.”
Whose heads those were isn’t clear, and nor is their current location, but the term ‘heads will roll’ normally means that some serious punishment was handed down. It sounds as though that happened at Sony rather than Naughty Dog, especially since the studio said that it made the decision to cancel the game to avoid becoming a live service studio beholden to that project’s continuing upkeep rather than the single-player games it’s best known for.
For Schreier, that was the right decision – “I’m glad that Naughty Dog was able to stave that off and cancel that project,” he says – but that fate has already befallen several other studios, sometimes with disastrous results. Batman: Arkham studio Rocksteady pivoted to the flop that was Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Anthem was a notable low point for BioWare, and Arkane Austin was shuttered following Redfall‘s failure. Maybe Naughty Dog had seen enough of the writing on the wall to know what was best for it.
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