It was the “most ambitious project they’ve ever worked on” (in the developer’s own words), but apparently they finally threw in the towel and Naughty Dog officially announced that they wouldn’t be launching a fashion multiplayer For The last of us. After years of generating excitement, the company has given a clear reason for this change of plans: it does not want to become an online game studio.
“We realize that many of you are waiting for news about the project we call The Last of Us Online, so it’s not easy to say this: we have made the difficult decision to completely stop development of this game .”
The Last of Us will not have multiplayer mode
The truth is that this announcement was a blow to the community, which had literally been waiting for years for the project to see the light of day. Naughty Dog has indeed admitted that the team intended to create this multiplayer mode has been in the pre-production phase of this game since it began working on The Last of Us Part II, which also means that it invested millions in it. . And I say, both as a fan and as a professional, that if the reason is that they didn’t want to become an online game studio… shouldn’t they have realized that much earlier?
“During the production process, the enormous scope of our ambition became evident. To launch and maintain The Last of Us Online, we would have to devote almost all of the studio’s resources to supporting post-launch content for years, which would have serious consequences for the development of future single-player games. So we had two paths before us: become a studio dedicated exclusively to online service games or continue to focus on the single-player narrative games that have always defined Naughty Dog’s legacy.
It is true that Naughty Dog has always been a studio focused on story type games, that is, they do not have any multiplayer component, just as it is true that to achieve this it is necessary not only develop the game for this, but also create and maintain a server infrastructure that supports it. At the same time, this means that for the game to stay alive, it would be necessary to create some sort of internal ecosystem to make profits and thus maintain the infrastructure… what we all call microtransactions.
On the other hand, it must also be recognized that in all likelihood, many fans of The Last of Us will breathe a sigh of relief upon hearing this news. It would be quite depressing if, of all the studios, Naughty Dog “perverted” itself by becoming just another studio that lives on revenue from a single game, releasing Season Passes, cosmetics, Battle Passes, etc.
In our opinion, this decision is more than respectable and we indeed believe that the frankness of the study deserves to be saluted. The only complaint we have is the one we already mentioned before, which is that it seems absurd to us that they decided this when they have been creating expectations and developing them for years… Have they not really didn’t think from the start that maintaining a multiplayer game has costs?
