- Former Microsoft executive Laura Fryer says Naughty Dog’s decision to cancel The last of us online It was “the right decision”
- She explains that the studio “made the hardest decision” by looking to the future and realizing it wouldn’t be able to sustain a live-service game.
- Fryer also questioned why Naughty Dog gave it the green light in the first place, saying, “The ambition was there, but the realistic initial planning was not.”
Former Microsoft Game Studios executive producer Laura Fryer believes the decision to cancel the last of us Online was the right decision on Naughty Dog’s part, and green-lighting the project was the “real mistake.”
Earlier this month, the last of us Online Game director Vinit Agarwal revealed that the multiplayer spin-off was “almost 80% complete” and “very, very close to being done” before Naughty Dog pulled the plug in 2023.
At the time of the game’s cancellation, the studio known for its single-player titles like Unexplored and the last of us He said he canceled the project because he did not want to “become a live-service-only game studio.”
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Agarwal, who shared that he worked on the game for seven years, learned of its cancellation 24 hours before the public and that Naughty Dog decided to focus on its main narrative single-player game. Intergalactic: the heretic prophetrather than diverting resources to an online degree.
According to Laura Fryer, as devastating as the cancellation was for the team and “soul crushing” as Agarwal described, this was “the right decision.”
“A lot of people say they should have finished the game and shipped it because it was so close, and I understand how frustrating that must be for players who were looking forward to the game,” Fryer said in a new YouTube video.
“But I think you’re missing the bigger picture because the truth is that this is a classic example of the sunk cost fallacy, and I’ve seen it many times before, where you have a studio that has already invested many years and millions and they feel like they have to release the game anyway, that they have no choice, even when they know that long-term live service support is going to be brutal.”
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Fryter went on to say that Naughty Dog did not do this and “made the toughest decision” by looking to the future and realizing that it would not be able to sustain a multiplayer game and risk turning the single-player studio into a live service operation that could only support one game for years to come.
“In my opinion, that was the right decision,” he said. “Although it hurt the team that worked so hard on it, they decided to return to what was their studio’s bread and butter: single-player narrative games.”
The former Xbox executive also questioned why Naughty Dog decided to start the project in the first place, calling the live service model “an infinite treadmill” for studios working on these types of games.
“Any studio leader could have figured out what a team is.” [of] “The size Naughty Dog could realistically support,” Fryer continued. “They could have seen quite clearly that a team the size of Naughty Dog could never support a live service game and all of its incredible cinematic single-player games. It wasn’t possible. But instead of doing that analysis, they went ahead and let the game run. They let it run for 7 years.”
Following Cancellation of The Last of Us OnlineFormer PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida revealed that comments from Destination Developer Bungie was involved in the decision, and Naughty Dog realized they couldn’t support it alongside their single-player projects.
Fryer comments that this was the “central theme” from the beginning, saying: “The ambition was there, but the realistic initial planning was not.”
“Ultimately, Naughty Dog protected what they do best: good cinematic single-player games. That’s good leadership, even when it hurts,” he added. “And sometimes the bravest thing a studio can do is admit that something isn’t going to work before dragging the entire company down with it.”
She continued, explaining that while fans may be disappointed and she understands the development team’s pain, “pulling it offline, that wasn’t the real mistake.”
“The real mistake was giving the green light to this experiment in the first place without doing the homework from the beginning. That’s my opinion,” Fryer said.
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