An insider has broken down some details on why Naughty Dog cancelled The Last of Us Online.
Last week, Naughty Dog revealed that they had cancelled The Last of Us Online. They had cited the main reason being scope creep. The Last of Us Online was originally going to be an extra mode added onto The Last of Us Part II, in the same way that Factions was the multiplayer mode added to the story campaign of the original The Last of Us.
Naughty Dog got excited adding features to this mode, to the point that they realized the scope of the project became too big. They then characterized the choice to cancel the project as a choice to become a dedicated live services game developer, or to continue to make single player narrative games.
Of course, even without saying so, Naughty Dog had to deal with other factors when making this decision. Months earlier, Jason Schreier broke the story that Sony had Bungie review The Last of Us Online, and Bungie assessed that the game would not be able to keep players’ attention for very long. For these reasons, Sony made the choice to ramp down the project, months before its official cancellation.
As reported by PSU, Tom Henderson laid down the metrics that Naughty Dog would have needed to have hit to satisfy Sony:
“Think about the economics at a base level. If the whole studio needed to work on TLOU MP, that’s 400 employees. If the average salary is $50K, that’s $20M a year in salary alone.Is TLOU MP going to sell 250,000 battle passes a quarter at $20 each over multiple years to cover that base cost? I really do doubt it and they probably did too.”
Without elaborating, Tom claims that it’s doubtful Naughty Dog, as popular and successful as that studio is, could have made The Last of Us Online profitable enough to be feasible. We are not even talking about chasing Fortnite or Destiny numbers, but the bare minimum of being profitable.
What’s implied here as well is that Naughty Dog built The Last of Us Online too much, to the point that it cost too much to make. While many companies are obviously endeavoring to become the next Fortnite, they haven’t remembered how Epic actually made the title; battle royale was actually just a small mode within the game, that they slowly iterated on as they saw success.
Epic sought to make their investment in Fortnite proportional to its profit, outside of predicting how successful it could be. If the game hit its peak much earlier, Epic would likely have not kept pushing the title further.
While we can understand logically the reasons that Naughty Dog and/or Sony decided that this title could not have been successful, this argument is unlikely to keep the fans happy. As this YouTuber pointed out, there are fans of Naughty Dog’s multiplayer, who would have wanted even just an online mode for The Last of Us Part II. But he argues, Naughty Dog could have released what they built, with no promise to add more to it.
We won’t be speculating here if The Last of Us Online was complete enough to release just for the fans to play, but it seems we will be talking about this cancelled game still well into 2024.
