Shuhei Yoshida, formerly an executive working with PlayStation until this January, has revealed that The Last of Us Online was ultimately cancelled because developer Naughty Dog didn’t have the bandwidth to work on the multiplayer game along with working on their next title. Speaking on the Sacred Symbols+ podcast (via Push Square), Yoshida mentions having played The Last of Us Online, and described it as being “great”.
According to Yoshida, while The Last of Us Online was turning out quite well, Destiny developer Bungie noted that it would have difficulty in retaining players for a longer period of time. This comes down to the fact that it takes a lot of effort for a studio to continuously produce new content to keep players hooked on to a live service game.
The decision was ultimately made at Naughty Dog to start focusing on its next game, Intergalactic, rather than having the studio split its attention between two titles that would both require quite a bit of work.
“The idea for The Last of Us Online came from Naughty Dog and they really wanted to make it,” said Yoshida. “But Bungie explained [to them] what it takes to make live service games, and Naughty Dog realised, ‘Oops, we can’t do that! If we do it, we can’t make Intergalactic.’ So that was a lack of foresight.”
Yoshida also noted in the interview that PlayStation never forced any of its first-party studios to start focusing on live service games. Rather, studios noticed PlayStation’s own focus on live service games, and would pitch their ideas to the company with the hopes of their games getting approved.
“From my experience, when studios see the company has a big initiative, [they realise] riding on that gives them a better chance of getting a project approved and supported,” Yoshida said. “It’s not like [current PS Studios boss Hermen Hulst] is telling teams they need to make live service games, it’s likely mutual.”
The Last of Us Online was one of many casualties of PlayStation’s attempts at getting big live service hits. While it was cancelled before seeing the light of day, other titles were not as lucky. Concord is a notable release where, despite having taken several years to develop with a big budget behind it, the game ended up with its servers shut down in less than a month.
The studio behind Concord, Firewalk Studios, was also subsequently shut down following the game’s demise. While Sony itself has been rather quiet about its other live service games that might be in development, rumours from earlier this year indicate that Concord‘s failure might have prompted the company to shut down its other live service games as well, including titles being developed by Bluepoint Games and Bend Studio.
Yoshida has previously spoken about Sony’s focus on live service games. Back in January, he spoke about Jim Ryan’s and Herman Hulst’s push for studios to start working on live service games, and how Yoshida would have pushed back against the ideas because Sony was known for its well-crafted single-player experiences.
