The cancellation of The Last of Us Online was reportedly not a “bloodless” affair; Sony is said to have imposed penalties for it.
In the Friends Per Second podcast, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier talked about the recent layoffs at Bungie and expressed his personal concerns about the studio’s next project, the Extraction shooter Marathonand the fact that “The mood I heard is not great.” From then on, the topic turned to Sony’s Live Service offensive, where the company announced that it a dozen such projects in progress.
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Schreier condemned this strategy as “trend chasing to the extreme” and lamented the “very, very long” list of games that were “dodges by single-player studios (…) that turned out to be debacles.” However, when asked whether Sony wanted to play it safe in order to find the next huge hit that could give the company a chance of survival in the years to come, Schreier said that this would be a prohibitively expensive strategy, pointing to last year’s Cancellation of The Last of Us Online.
“Naughty Dog’s Factions game was in development for about four years, with a team of several hundred people,” says Schreier, referring to the game named after its predecessor’s multiplayer mode. “That’s an expensive endeavor for something that was a failure. And this project that was canceled was not a bloodless endeavor. A lot of heads rolled at Sony because of it.”
Whose heads those were isn’t clear, nor is their current location, but the phrase “heads will roll” usually means that a serious punishment was meted out. It sounds like that’s what happened at Sony rather than Naughty Dog, especially since the studio said it made the decision to cancel the game to avoid becoming a live service studio beholden to the ongoing upkeep of that project rather than the single-player games it’s best known for.
For Schreier, this was the right decision – “I’m glad Naughty Dog was able to prevent this and cancel the project,” he says – but this fate has already befallen several other studios, sometimes with disastrous results. Batman: Arkham studio Rocksteady focused on the flop Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Anthem was a notable low point for BioWareand Arkane Austin was closed after Red Case‘s failure. Perhaps Naughty Dog had read the signs of the times to know what was best for the company.
Although “The Last of Us Online” was canceled, some of its developers said it was “the highlight of my career.”
