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.
Aka- layoffs happened/are happening.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/3/23901251/naughty-dog-layoffs-developers-last-of-us-multiplayer
Yeah sure layoffs aren’t happening.