Laura Fryer was a big name when the Xbox project was launched and is considered one of the console's co-creators; she is also often regarded as the founder of Microsoft Game Studios. Today, she is best known for her YouTube channel, where she keeps a close eye on the industry and shares her thoughts on various topics, never mincing her often blunt words.
Now she's done it again, and this time she's taking aim at Naughty Dog and their cancelled live-service game based on The Last of Us. She simply cannot fathom how it ever got the green light to begin with, arguing that the executives had simply been sloppy with their research. A studio of their size could never have handled the project if it had actually launched while they also continued to develop single-player titles, and thus she believes it was for the best that it was cancelled:
"I keep coming back to the bigger question of why did they start this game in the first place. 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."
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But despite all this, work on the game continued diligently for seven years, and she believes it was Bungie that finally made everyone realize what was actually required:
"But instead of doing that analysis, they went ahead and let the game go forward. They let it run for 7 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."
As we recently reported, the game was about 80% complete when the plug was pulled, which hit the team very hard and led to several departures. But Fryer believes that was the only reasonable course of action, as Naughty Dog would otherwise have been reduced to a live service support team:
"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."
In the end, she believes it was the right decision to pull the plug on a game that should never have been greenlit in the first place, and return to the single-player titles that Naughty Dog does best:
"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."
Do you think Fryer has a point?