„There Were Some Heads Rolling at Sony.” Cancellation of The Last of Us Online Had Some Consequences, Reports Jason Schreier
The cancellation of The Last of Us: Factions may have ended very unpleasantly for some people. According to Jason Schreier at Sony, „some heads were rolling”.
In December of last year, Naughty Dog studio announced that work on The Last of Us: Factions was halted. The reason was supposed to be the desire to focus on single-player titles, and the online project grew to such a size that it required too much resource allocation. Behind the scenes, things weren't as positive as they may have seemed, and the matter wasn't quickly closed and forgotten.
"Some heads were rolling at Sony"
During a conversation with Jason Schreier in the latest episode of the Friends Per Second podcast – published on the Skill Up YouTube channel – at one point the topic of Sony came up, and more specifically the company's focus on game services. Bloomberg's editor criticized this approach, stating that it involves "chasing trends to the limit," leading many studios to move away from single-player games and ultimately release poor, unprofitable titles. Schreier thinks that looking for a potential hit in this way is too expensive and points to the canceled Factions as an example.
Naughty Dog's Factions game was in development for something like 4 years, with a team in the hundreds. That is an expensive proposition for something that was a miss. There were some heads rolling at Sony as a result of that one.
So it seems that someone at Sony received a serious backlash for either delaying work on Factions or bringing the game to a point where it had to be canceled. Interestingly, this took place within the ranks of the Japanese giant, not Naughty Dog itself. By the way, according to Schreier, the studio made the right decision and he is glad that the game wasn't released.
It cannot be denied that expensive games-as-a-service pose a significant risk, as we have seen in the industry many times. It's enough to mention the recent Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League or Redfall, which led to the shutdown of Arkane Austin. Perhaps Naughty Dog didn't want to suffer a similar fate and decided to back out in time.
