Naughty Dog Ends Development Of The Last Of Us Online

I wouldn't want to bank my whole studio on one title being a blockbuster success either.

Especially after TLOU2…

shudders
- It sold 10,000,000 copies. It was the best selling first-party PS4 exclusive released.
  
  I know the loud internet people were upset about Girls With Muscles or whatever, but it did fantastic with normal people.
- Did you play it? If so, fair enough, but if not you're missing out in my opinion. When it was announced i never believed i'd ever question whether a sequel could top the story told by the original, how could it? Playing through it a second time i do have that question now, it's that good.

Naughty dog's average customer is not interested to online games. It would have flopped

Bad idea starting, good idea stopping before too late

I’m not convinced any online-only games are worth anyone’s time if they’re planned as a live service game from the get-go. When Halo: Infinite F2P multiplayer dropped, so many people on the Halo subreddit were like “yeah, it’s fun but the battlepass is so slow to progress that I feel like I don’t have a reason to keep playing.” Uhhhhh maybe keep playing because you’re having fun? Or do you need some artificial number to tell you to keep going?

Seems like a confusing shift in the target demographic where battlepasses and constant new updates are required in order to consider a game “worth your time.”

squeaky old man voice back in my day my brothers and I would play CoD: Zombies using the exact same strategies every day after school for years with no updates to the gameplay AND WE LIKED IT

Yeah I don't get it either. Everyone rn is saying that Halo infinite multiplayer sucks because you "have to" pay for cosmetics or do lots of shit to progress the battlepass.

Literally all COSMETIC. Like it's not even pay to win, just play the genuinely fun multiplayer game wtf
- Yeah, if the game is fun then ignore the cosmetics. If you like the cosmetics enough, then buy the cosmetics. As long as gameplay elements aren’t locked behind a paywall, I see no problem.

Good Naughty Dog.

Makes sense. The world moved on from Unreal Tournament for better or worse. You can't just release and leave an online-only game any more. It has to be supported with years of content, or it's never going to be popular and make it's money back.

I'm going to guess it was always a small team ticking over in the background of Naughty Dog anyway. Their minute to minute gameplay is solid, but their stories and bombastic set-pieces are much more interesting and separate them from a crowd of pretenders.

There are actually still people playing the original Unreal Tournament from 1999 on public servers. I occasionally jump on one of them and it's still the glorious chaos it always was!
- Yeah, it's still there, but it's from a different era. If Naughty Dog could make TLOU Online for $2 million like UT was developed for, they'd have just done it. I suspect they've spent more than that just on market research, and the answer has been "gamers aren't really interested".
  
  I mean, I like the TLOU and Uncharted games, honestly don't think Naughty Dog has ever released a bad game since the PS1, but I can't see my self playing some online multiplayer only bullshit version of it. The players that do want that have already got enormously successful games that they already play. Muscling one of them out of contention seems like a monumentally hard task for a small team to do.

They finally announced the obvious.

Must've been because it required more effort than releasing the same thing over and over for full price with a new coat of paint

I have hard time believing they had this great product they just didn't want to support for a few years. Specially with how Sony has been dead set on having many live service games in its portfolio.

Specially with how Sony has been dead set on having many live service games in its portfolio.

the previous CEO was dead set on that, but he's gone
- The flop of high profile titles like The Avengers showed that it's no golden bullet.
  
  Some gamers love a game they can play forever. Maybe others gamers dabble in it, but it's time that becomes the limiting factor. I know people that every year buy CoD and FIFA and nothing else, and sure, they make unreasonable amounts of money, but there's plenty more on the table to be had from gamers who don't like that.

Controversial opinion but I actually am kinda sad to hear this. I remember really liking the OG Factions multiplayer games in TLOU 1. It was really refreshing at the time for multiplayer shooters, since you needed a lot of tactics and teamwork to get resources in order to craft tools and take out their other team. Really nerve-wracking, engaging gameplay at the time. And since you had one life per round, you couldn't just run and gun like in CoD/BF.

I know that the multiplayer game they were coming out with wasn't like this, but I would've been happy to play Factions again and relive the old days. Probably one of the last games that I've really enjoyed a multiplayer shooter.