- Former Microsoft Executive Laura Fryer Says Naughty Dog’s Decision to Cancel The Last of Us Online it was “the right choice”
- She explains that the studio “made a harder choice” 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 the green light in the first place, saying, “The ambition was there, but the realistic initial planning wasn’t.” »
Former Microsoft Game Studios Executive Producer Laura Fryer Reflects on Decision to Cancel The last of us Online was the right decision on Naughty Dog’s part, and greenlighting the project was the “real mistake.”
Earlier this month, The last of us Online Game director Vinit Agarwal revealed that the multiplayer spinoff was “almost 80% complete” and “was very, very close to being finished” 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 said it canceled the project because it did not want to “become a live-action-only game studio.”
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Agarwal, who said 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 single-player narrative game, Intergalactic: the heretic prophetinstead of diverting resources to an online title.
According to Laura Fryer, despite how devastating the cancellation was for the team and “crushing” as Agarwal described it, it 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 that ignores the bigger picture, because the truth is that this is a classic example of a sunk cost fallacy, and I’ve seen this happen many times before in the case of a studio that has already spent many years and millions and feels like they have to ship the game anyway, that they have no choice, even though they know that long-term live support will be brutal.”
Look on it
Fryter went on to claim that Naughty Dog did not do this and had “made the harder choice” by looking to the future and realizing that it would not be able to support a multiplayer game and risked turning the single-player studio into a live service operation only capable of supporting a single game for years to come.
“In my opinion, it was the right decision,” she said. “Even though it hurt the team that worked so hard on it, they chose to return to what their studio’s bread and butter was, which was single-player narrative games.”
The former Xbox executive also questioned why Naughty Dog decided to launch the project, calling the live service model an “infinite treadmill” for studios working on these types of games.
“Any studio head could have calculated what a team is [of] “The size Naughty Dog could reasonably support,” Fryer continued. “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 incredible cinematic single-player games. That wasn’t possible. But instead of doing that analysis, they went ahead and let the game move forward. They let it run for 7 years.”
Following Cancellation of The Last of Us OnlineFormer PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida revealed that comments from Fate Developer Bungie played a role in the decision, and Naughty Dog realized it couldn’t support it alongside its single-player projects.
Fryer notes that this was the “central problem” from the start: “The ambition was there, but the realistic initial planning was not.”
“Naughty Dog has finally protected what they do best, good cinematic single-player games. That’s good leadership, even when it hurts,” she added. “And sometimes the bravest thing a studio can do is admit something isn’t going to work before it drags the whole company down with it.”
She went on to explain that while fans may be disappointed and she understands the development team’s pain, “pulling the plug wasn’t the real mistake.”
“The real mistake was green-lighting this experiment without doing the homework first. That’s my view,” Fryer said.
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