In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear. To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games. So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.
Works better from a marketing and PR angle to spin it that it will be soo good that we need to focus everything on it vs. it’s gonna crash and burn like the first so let’s cut the losses now.
It had been mentioned previously. After Sony acquired Bungie, they put them to task on auditing a few other projects to figure out how to optimize the live service models of several upcoming games, with TLoU 2’s multiplayer mode being among them. After Bungie’s assessment was not overly favorable, the project was frozen (in news earlier this year) and now appears to have been officially canceled.
No one asked for live service and I don’t think they mentioned it until now themselves.
If it was as good as they thought it was, they would make it work, sans live service.
So many good multiplayer games weren’t live service games and did just fine
Works better from a marketing and PR angle to spin it that it will be soo good that we need to focus everything on it vs. it’s gonna crash and burn like the first so let’s cut the losses now.
It had been mentioned previously. After Sony acquired Bungie, they put them to task on auditing a few other projects to figure out how to optimize the live service models of several upcoming games, with TLoU 2’s multiplayer mode being among them. After Bungie’s assessment was not overly favorable, the project was frozen (in news earlier this year) and now appears to have been officially canceled.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/3/23901251/naughty-dog-layoffs-developers-last-of-us-multiplayer
Yeah sure layoffs aren’t happening.