The cancellation of 'The Last of Us Online' reportedly wasn't a "bloodless endeavour" at Sony.
The cancellation of The Last of Us Online reportedly wasn't a 'bloodless endeavour' at Sony
After the highly-anticipated single-player sequel 'The Last of Us Part II' released in 2020, developer Naughty Dog – which is owned by PlayStation Studios - announced it was working on a separate multiplayer title for the series, though continued to delay it until it was ultimately cancelled last December – with the company citing at the time it did not want to "become a solely live service games studio".
Now, industry insider Jason Schreier has claimed shelving the project – which was due to be an evolved version of 'The Last of Us's multiplayer mode Factions - led to "some heads rolling at Sony".
Speaking on the 'Friends Per Second' podcast, he said: "The list of games that have been pivots from single player studios to trying to make service online games that just turned out to be debacles is very, very long.
"I think I've done post-mortems for a lot of them - the cycle is, 'single-player studio [are] super successful, pivots to live service. Spends seven years making a live service game nobody wants. Live service game comes out, it's a debacle.'
"I mean, Naughty Dog's Factions game was in development for something like four years with a team in the hundreds. Like, that is an expensive proposition for something that was a miss.
"That project, like that getting cancelled, was not a bloodless endeavour. There were some heads rolling at Sony as a result of that one."