With The Last of Us Online having been cancelled for quite some time now, Microsoft Game Studios co-founder Laura Fryer has spoken about how the project’s eventual cancellation was ultimately a good thing. In a new video, she spoke about the game’s development team and how she empathized with them for seeing their work come to nought. However, she also went on to criticize how the project was generally handled.
Fryer noted from her own extensive experience in overseeing game development on a wide range of projects that a typical multiplayer game tends to require a lot of planning, especially in its earlier production stages. She praised Naughty Dog for not falling into the “sunk cost” fallacy, since it had already invested quite a bit of money in its development before eventually cancelling the whole thing.
“A lot of people are saying they should have just finished the game and shipped it because it was so close, and I understand how frustrating it must be for the players who were looking forward to this game,” said Fryer. “But I think that’s missing the bigger picture because the truth is that this is a classic example of the sunk cost fallacy. And I’ve seen it play out many times before, where you have a studio that’s already spent many years and millions of dollars, and they feel like they have to ship the game anyway, that they have no choice, even when they know the long-term live service support will be brutal. Then the game comes out half-baked, the team burns out on endless updates, and it usually ends badly.”
“Naughty Dog didn’t do that. They made the harder choice. They looked at the road ahead, and they realized that they should stop instead of risking turning the entire studio into a live service operation that was only going to be able to support one big title for years. In my opinion, that was the right call, even though it hurt the team that worked so hard on it. They chose to go back to what the bread and butter of their studio was, single-player narrative games.”
Fryer’s criticisms were primarily aimed at the leadership of Naughty Dog for having continuously supported the development of the live-service game. In fact, she believes that the project shouldn’t have been greenlit to begin with. Among other things, she questions the lack of planning and analysis, which led to a seven-year-long development period that ended with cancellation.
“I keep coming back to the bigger question of why did they start this game in the first place,” she said. “Where was the planning? Live service games are not a mystery. There’s plenty of data out there that they could have looked at to understand what it would take to do this type of game. You’ve got new maps. You’ve got new modes, weapons, seasons, balance patches. It’s an infinite treadmill. Any studio leader could have run the numbers on what a team Naughty Dog size could realistically support. They could have seen pretty clearly that a team the size of Naughty Dog could never support a live service game and all of their amazing cinematic single player games. It wasn’t possible.
“But instead of doing that analysis, they went ahead and let the game go forward. They let it run for seven years. Eventually, Bungie was brought in to do an analysis in 2023, and their reality check on player retention and what it really takes is what finally convinced people that it might be a problem.”
It is worth noting that former director Vinit Agarwal has spoken fondly about the project and discussed the disappointment he felt when it was eventually cancelled. In an interview, he said that it “was a devastating moment for me because I spent seven years working on the game, and it was soul-crushing.” Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has also spoken about the push for live-service games at PlayStation, and how he wasn’t really a fan of the idea.
