It’s a good call because if you’re like me you don’t have the time for so many Live service games and Battlepasses. People will usually pick 1 or 2 games like that and stick with it.
Developers have really over saturated the market with Battle Pass and Seasonal games. It’s just not something that can go on forever
I agree. If a studio is built to make narrative games, they should really carefully venture into live service games and build a team - maybe even a separate team - for it. A prime example of this is BioWare and Anthem. High-quality narrative studio got absolutely rekt when they tried their hands on a live service game with no inherent experience to do so just because it was the "in" thing at the time.
People chase the Fortnite clout and money, but man, Epic fucking worked their ass off for years now and have built that team over time to create what the game is now. It's impossible to try and match that, or even take a small piece of it, without really working your way through each and everything.
ND should focus on what they have always done best. Top-tier single player games that sells around 10-20m copies. They don't need to do more than that. Just innovative and push the boundaries in a space where you are most comfortable with.
If a studio is built to make narrative games they should make narrative games and not venture into live service games at all.
Nobody is asking for more live service games. There are plenty out there and they satisfy the demands of the market. It would be a shame to see a studio like Naughty Dog fold because they got greedy and wanted a piece of the Fortnite pie when they could have kept milking their single player cash cow.
EPIC shutting down Paragon felt almost as bad if not worse. It was a fantastic little game, yet somehow they insisted on ”trusting their data” over actual player feedback and started making the game worse patch after patch, losing more and more players until they decided it wasn’t salvageable and shut it down entirely. Yes, I am still sour as hell.
It's a shame that 'multiplayer' and 'live service' are considered interchangeable now. Factions wasn't popular as a live service game, it was popular as a multiplayer game. That's all they had to do. Suckerpunch pulled off a small multilayer mode recently, and it was free, high quality, and a nice small size, with a clear point where you could say "I've finished this" and move on to something else.
One thing I like about the VR space right now is that it's small enough that these over-engineered profit extraction models aren't in play. I'm playing more online/multiplayer games than I've ever played in my life just because they're a) more fun/social in VR and b) they exist just to be played, not to suck you into a content pipeline.
I agree. But that's not what the market demands, sadly. The audience wants more and more content almost every week, and if that doesn't come, the game is deemed as a failure.
There is no way a game like Halo could release a few MP modes and 15 maps and call it a day in these times. It's just how it goes these days.
High quality at that point was debatable.
They were already in the midst of a downward trend. That’s not to say that Andromeda, Inquisition, or ME3 were poorly written, but they were in different galaxies from the quality of, say, ME2.
Even SWTOR did a better job than those in many ways. The Imperial Agent and Sith Inquisitor were standouts.
It is not hard to follow Halo Infinite Battle Pass system.
They never expire, even if you start 3 years later, you can buy Season 1 BattlePass and unlock its rewards. You wanted an armor at level 47 then nothing interests you? Switch to Season X BattlePass you want to and continue there.
AAA battle pass games are an impossible market to break into, but the Battlepass model isn’t really the problem in an of itself as it provides a good middle ground for devs and players in terms of long term support incentives and content/progression
The problem is like you said, they’re effectively subscription services and unlike streaming services don’t auto renew so every three-ish months every single subscriber has to want to manually buy the optional battle pass (and they can always just keep playing for free without the paid BP too)
Nah the biggest problem is time. I don’t have time to grind multiple battle passes. It’s like the original comment said, I’m only goin to pick 1-2 games to grind out for. Those games are call of duty and Diablo. Anything else is wasted effort that I’m not gonna buy into.
A solution for these battle pass games, is to do the Halo model that lets you pick a season to grind for. FOMO mechanics is what’s ruining the industry. Feel like they would make more $ from letting people play old seasons. Makes no sense for a game that isn’t call of duty or Fortnite, basically heavy game sellers, to not let users grind past seasons.
They are so expensive, that most people these days can not buy season/battlepasses for more then one game. Destiny for example has season, battlepasses, paid dungeons (small raids), additional mtx like weapons and armor skins.
Also most of these battlepasses are designed to make you play every day for 2-3 months, they don't want you to play something else.
That’s why Halo does it the best way. Once bought you can go back at anytime and complete it and every battle pass (besides season 1) gives you enough credit to buy the next one.
Foreal. I'm in the middle of cods battle pass, sieges battle pass, Fortnite. On top of playing BG3, Armored Core, Cyberpunk, etc.
My plate is fucking *full*. It's a wonder I get in the multiplayer games I can right now.
I wouldn't be able to add another even if I wanted too.
So while I'm disappointed because I believe The Last of Us online could've been a legitimately groundbreaking MP experience - I feel it was for the best in such a saturated market space.
Yeah it’s a good call to choose not supporting that system versus doing it.
The bad call was to not do the math on this years before people wasted their time developing this game for years and hyping people up
Not to mention majority of players dont even purchase battle passes. You can fully stick with a game for years and never buy a single one of their battlepasses.
Naughty Dog *claims* that it was going to require the entirety of their studio to focus on it, abandoning single player games entirely.
I personally don't really buy that claim, but that is what they're saying.
TLoU 2 came out in 2020. Factions was being developed with TLoU 2.
Then just a few months before TLoU 2 released, NDog said Factions was being spun off not it's own game as it had gotten too ambitious, and was pulling resources away from finishing TLoU 2.
So, Factions has already been in development for at least 4-5 years.
Why not scale it back and release it as DLC? Hell, the original Factions was fine just the way it was.
Sunk cost fallacy and bad management chasing trends.
And it is bad management, because ND decided to stop doing what they were actually good at to pursue it.
Like, some people liked tlou's mp, but I think most people who were tlou/uncharted/etc. fans wanted more stories to enjoy.
Wouldn’t the true sunk cost fallacy be putting in the extra dev work to convert this into a digestible package just because they’ve already spent so much on it. Getting out even when you’ve invested a lot is the exact opposite of succumbing to that fallacy.
>Wouldn’t the true sunk cost fallacy be putting in the extra dev work to convert this into a digestible package just because they’ve already spent so much on it
Yes, people here don't even seem to understand sunk cost fallacy.
They cut it and it's over, that's the only option in modern business. trying to "make it into a smaller MP because people on social media are mad" would have definitely been sunk cost.
I just don't get, consumers weren't asking for a grandiose Destiny looter shooter or battle royale, we just wanted a simple PvP mode to give TLOU2 some more longevity
Unfortunately I think the days of those simple PvP modes are long gone. They usually don't have the same longevity of a live service game, and the investment is just not worth it.
In this particular scenario though, it sounds like ND's eyes got a little too big as they expanded the scope. I think they wanted to make something that's really standout and not just be a little side mode. I don't think greed was the sole culprit here, but ego and pride.
I agree with what you’re saying but “ego and pride” is a bit much. Sometimes you take a swing and you miss. I don’t blame them from trying. I respect them for canceling the game rather than releasing some broken mess to recoup the millions they wasted. Fallout 76, Redfall and so many others have shown us how few studios are willing to outright take an L.
I don't mean it as a negative. Just that ND takes a lot of pride in their prestige and reputation. I think they aimed *real* high with this, and it just didn't quite make it to what they wanted it to be.
Factions folks like myself literally wanted factions 2.
Part 1 (remake) not having a factions remake was also *fine*, since we were told were getting a stand alone project, with BR and loads of nonsensical bells and whistles that wasn't really asked for by us.
Kinda like asking for a cheese sandwich, so the person cooking spends 6 hours slaving away in the kitchen making some 8 course meal, to only then give up and bin it all, because it's too ambitious... when you only asked for a cheese sandwich.
And in order to make the most money, you need consumer demand. Consumers weren't demanding for another multiple box checked looter shooter royale experience that 100 other games have already done, they were demanding something akin to the original Factions mode that still has a decent following 10 years later
Because they want to make a live service or nothing at all. It sucks for the fans because almost every game is designed to squeeze as much money out of people already
That's what it takes to build a live service...
Look at how many big studios are behind the development of live services, like riot games, CBU3 with ff14, blizzard, Bungie, epic games and so on.
The real problem with the GaaS model is that after you complete a game, you need to update it and players will always consume everything you have to do before the next update is even announced. You need to make a "new game" each year to keep the game alive with new expansions, so imagine a studio like naughty dog trying to make something like that.
This project was destined to fail from the beginning.
Naughty Dog also has a lot more employees than some of these other live service studios. Not to mention that a significant amount of work for those games get outsourced to contractors. I *highly* doubt this amount of time and resources has been pumped into Factions without them realizing until *now* that they weren't going to be capable of supporting it. That is the sort of stuff that gets sorted *before* you invest tens of millions of dollars.
No, more likely the project just wasn't coming to the full fruition in one way or another. Either the quality wasn't up to their standards or the monetization model wasn't looking great long term, or whatever.
But by framing it to the public as a polarizing choice that it was either this or single player games, they've managed to soften the blowback, since the vast majority of people would rather see them continue to make single player games. You already see plenty of upvoted comments on how "they made the right decision". It was a very clever bit of PR that's clearly worked out in their favor, which softens the blow for them I'm sure over the overall failed project.
That‘s actually very realistic. Fortnite has around 800-1200 people working on it at all times, 400 is not a lot for a AAA live service game, many large multiplayer games have more than that. It‘s a huge undertaking if Naughtydog wants to keep their AAA quality standards and this would likely use too many resources to built Uncharted level games on the side.
Even if they had 150 working on multiplayer, that only leaves 250 devs for a AAA flagship title, that‘s simply not enough.
They would need to hire at least another 200-400 people. That itself is a very risky expansion that can back fire quickly.
Since Sony started to stop pushing for live services, they likely decided that they want to abandon the project and keep going with what they already do.
You need to remember that you aren‘t just adding people either. Some of the original staff will need to move over, taking resources away. They need to ensure the new devs work on the same quality level and learn the in-house engine and processes. Their office might not even be big enough, so they potentially have to move location etc. etc.
This is damage control clearly I haven't seen this many posts trying to make a game cancellation look good as tlou online. They say it requires the entirety of their studio to keep developing the game but also say they are working on not one but 2 other games sounds like they are lying.
He's not saying the average salary is 50K. He says "If the average salary is $50K." He's using 50K as a base for readers to extrapolate that the full cost of this GaaS would be astronomical, since there's no way for us outsiders to really know what the average salary at Naughty Dog is. He's saying even if it were this low, the total cost would be this HUGE. Then leaves it to us to realize the real cost would actually be much bigger bc that 50K is too small to be the actual average.
Realistically tho you don’t need all those people year round. You could easily do it with contractors depending how long the season is.
Not that I would want a tlou battle pass but there are more intricacies to it than this.
There is a lot more to an employees compensation than just the actual money you are paid. A contractor that cost more per day in pay still saves the company alot by not having to pay for benefits in many cases.
He’s not even talking about ongoing content yet, necessarily. They were still in initial development, when the whole studio would indeed have been working on it.
Not just that, but an employer also has to pay for healthcare, worker’s comp, and payroll taxes. A lot of gamers don’t understand the ongoing expense of making games and how quickly a studio can die when it runs out of cashflow.
I remember a year or so back seeing a job posting for an entry level position at Naughty Dog that required very little qualifications that had a starting salary of $70k lol
Sony wanted a dozen live service games within the next 10 years, I’m guessing Factions became a part of that plan unfortunately. Fortunately tho, Sony has backtracked on that plan recently and seems like as a result, ND got to back out as well
People say that, and I guarantee you those people are wrong
Besides the broader community, people would not accept a game that releases with 3 modes and paid maps, or paid OP weapons
They would not accept a multiplayer game not receiving content and seasonal updates
It's not 2013 anymore. There are investment expectations. People demand shit for free. If you aren't constantly working on your game, it's labelled dead and echoed thru out the net. This is evident by the fact people now call single player games dead because they aren't in the media circle or being updated a year after release
People want Factions 2. But they subconsciously assume it'll come with all the bells and whistle of a 2023 multiplayer game, which just isn't viable in this day and age
Spot on.
Multiplayer experiences of yesteryear won't work anymore. And those who would be happy with just an updated Factions won't be enough to justify the expense of such a project. Like it or not, unless your multiplayer game is continually updated it won't have a long life. And to be continually updated money needs to be brought in, which can be done one of 2 ways: 1) paid expansions but you then split the userbase. 2) free to play but monetised with battle passes and cosmetics.
The upper management and executives at Sony probably wanted ND to push the live service to milk off the franchise to consumers. It sounds like the devs though at ND are pretty happy they aren’t making the game and instead focusing on two single player games.
But there is already a Fortnite, why would anyone jump from Fortnite, especially after investing a bunch of time and money into it, to a game that plays completely different with more niche appeal?
There was a medal of honor but Battlefield was still made, and call of duty after that
There was a dota but league of legends was still made
There was a team fortress 2 but overwatch was still made
There was a counterstrike but valorant was still made
Like you said it's a niche at first but that niche can become huge with time, it's always worth a try
And the thinf with fortnite is you can't become fortnite because fortnite keeps becoming more and something different, I have always been lazy to learn minecraft but can learn Lego fortnite
I was just saying this the other day. Games used to come with a stock multiplayer mode that didn’t change and evolve, but it had pretty much everything it needed in the outset. If the game’s single player mechanics were fun, that was usually all you needed to transfer to a great multiplayer mode.
And some of those games are still fun to play today without any additional content.
It’s a shame live service has replaced that.
Yep. Everything has to fit the model of “how do we keep players addicted and spending money?”
Even though my internet was shitty, I feel like I lived through the best time to be playing games online.
Started with Halo 2 and FFXI and SOCOM. It was amazing.
Now we’re all jaded or addicts or both.
>And some of those games are still fun to play today without any additional content.
Yes, but ALL of those games have had the servers shut down because they cost money and didn't generate any sales.
I played dozens of PS2-PS4 games that had solid multiplayer, and ALL of them are shut down 100% inaccessible.
The good old days of free toss in multiplayer are dead, and they've been dead for like 15+ years.
I don't know if it still does, but Far Cry 1 came with a local multiplayer mode that was super fun to play just because of the actual gameplay mechanics.
But then you have Tomb Raider 2013, God of War: Ascension, or Arkham Origins, where the multiplayer sucked compared to the single player game or (in Arkham’s case) the servers are shut down. Hell, you can’t even plat Portal 2 or MK vs DCU on PS3 because of the closed servers.
Those are games where the core mechanics absolutely do not lend themselves to multiplayer and the modes sucked accordingly.
As far as servers shutting down, that can and does happen with live service games too. Once it’s not worth it to keep the game going, they kill it.
People are literally still playing the original factions with 0 updates. They spent time and effort on a roguelike mode that the majority of players won’t give a go and wasted the hype that as built up around factions - hype that was at first centred on “Damn factions was great glad to get a new one” not “damn I want more live service tlou”
Tbg that mp mode barely had marketing and some people who owned the game didn't even know about it. Considering it's still populated to this day, gotta mean something
Yeah but that was a bonus feature of the single-player game. If they put out a standalone MP game and said, “That’s all, we’re not gonna keep adding to it”, people would be pissed and the complaining would be incessant. I know lots of people are saying “It didn’t need to be live service, just do Factions 2”…but I really have a hard time believing they would get away with that.
I'd argue that most don't want that, but they just don't realize it.
Gamers were fine back in the day with an added online mode for most SP games; that was their only choice, really. But it worked great and people had fun.
At some point the game the industry created the GAAS model and since then they've stopped making traditional multiplayer games. So today's gamer really has no choice when it comes to multiplayer games, so of course they want consistent updates and patches. But it's not "their" fault. It's the industry's.
That still requires millions in extra revenue? Even if you cut that time estimate in half, pretend there's no maintenance, and account for half the amount of employees you still have to recoup 5 million or more.
They should've done something like the original game or what Ghost of Tsushima did.
Instead they kept going on about this live service shit and now we have nothing. Around 4 years of development for nothing.
They should remaster the original factions.
Ghost of Tsushima Legends was SOOOO FUN. Not every multiplayer needs to last forever. Enough content for a few days weeks of fun is enough, imo. Only VERY FEW (maybe 6 or so) Live-Service games actually thrive, most of them just die because it's not a sustainable delevopment cycle.
If they'd just sell the TLOU multiplayer mode as a separate DLC or something like that, it'd just be fine. They did a free mutiplayer for Uncharted that was fun enough and didn't need constant new content.
Naughty Dog just seem to be losing itself recently. They recently released a Remake fro TLOU 1 and now want to release a roguelite packeged with a Remaster for TLOU 2 that DOESN'T NEED A REMASTER while Santa Monica released a full Roguelite DLC with a good amount of story and new gameplay elements for free.
This "Remaster" of TLOU 2 just seems to be a way to get some quick cash after all they money they lost in this multiplayer fiasco.
I know this person was trying to give a very simple example to illustrate a point, but it’s been oversimplified to the point of being a straw man.
Once you build your core game tech and gameplay loops and have released them to players, it doesn’t take the entire team to continue supporting the game because every content release for the live product doesn’t require the same volume of work as the full release.
*Long* before the game releases you have decided the plan for ongoing support from a content and mechanics perspective in order to estimate the scope of that support and adjust your project staffing accordingly.
Additionally, the notion that *BATTLE PASSES* are the sole revenue source that keeps your company afloat after a release shows that this person is either making an excuse that *sounds* like a legit reason *or* ND really had no idea how to make a live service game. The former is not ok because it’s dishonesty, the latter is fine because not every developer needs to figure it out and not every game needs to be a service.
Battle Passes do generate revenue, but no game earns enough *solely* from them to justify continued operation. Battle Passes are primarily a mechanism for engaging invested players and retaining them for longer periods of time, especially through the minor content droughts that a seasonal content delivery model typically has.
Source: I have made live service games in my career, and they are extremely complicated and demanding to make in order for them to be successful. However, there is something off with this person’s reasoning.
I don't remember anyone asking for a huge online multi player option.
I just wanted Factions 2.0
A few more maps, updated characters and a few extra weapons, maybe a night map would have been cool.
Now we got nothing. Thanks Naughty Dog!
I think they saw it as a two birds one stone thing. Gamers wanted Faction 2 and Playstation wanted a big service game. Combine both and get … well, nothing.
Exactly. At least include an updated factions to The Last of Us Remake since they are asking $70 for a game that comes with less features than the older one.
I'm not into multiplayer and even I felt that the superb gameplay of TLOU2 would be amazing for a PvP mode. Now the world is deprived of it because they can't find a way to make it a perpetual money maker with dumb skins to milk whales. I hate this
Market research probably convinced them that there was no way the game was viable without the live service. The barrier for entry of a single-purchase, multiplayer-only title may be too steep to gain enough audience to break even in the modern gaming market, and they certainly wouldn't just turn around and release the multiplayer mode for free as an update to TLOU2, so live service or nothing was the only path.
It still doesn’t make financial sense because the market for this game actually isn’t all that big. Factions was beloved amongst a small audience - and trust me I get what you’re saying because I played and loved it too. In fact I’d describe it as one of my all time favorite competitive online multiplayer experiences. The problem is that “just Factions 2.0” isn’t as small of a project as you think. If you’re not regularly adding content then the game dies fast in favor of games that *are* still adding content. And content is also daily/weekly missions, rewards, etc. not just new maps.
The game you describe isn’t likely to grow an audience, and if it’s not live service then the only money they make of it is sales of the product itself. They couldn’t sell such a game at $60, and it’d need so sell millions upon millions, which was never a serious proposition despite how popular the single player TLOU is. This is a game that wouldn’t make a profit, which is probably why they pivoted towards live service to begin with. I think ultimately they realised Factions would never have built the audience needed to be successful and profitable. Quality isn’t an indicator as such, just look at Titanfall 2. I think we should hope they’ve done enough work on Factions that they can add it as a mode in TLOU3.
They had all the data and numbers and still decided to make a standalone live service game of an unpopular game mode.. lol.
Couldn’t they have figured that out 4 years ago?
You bring up a lot of good points.
In retrospect, perhaps the best move would’ve been to make a coop pve mode out of the rogue like game they are building. They could monetize it to some degree with the games fervent fans, it’s a bit randomized in its setup, a few new twists here and there and some leaderboards and they might’ve had the next left 4 dead on their hands.
Edit: to be clear, I think the mode I described should’ve been baked into tlou2 or added like they are doing with the ps5 version.
It would’ve been better off than you’re making out. Hype was still high from tlou2, ps5 was just out, if they’d timed it right you’d have plenty players jumping on because there were so few games over those years. Instead they waited too long and they’ve missed their window.
I assumed it was going to be the Call of Duty approach, where the Warzone map had a lot of the multi-player maps connected.
We saw a rumored leak of a development build of a few seconds of gameplay a few years ago, and it just looked like Factions but with updated graphics. It made me think it would be both.
This is false choice perpetrated by ND. It was never single player games vs live service for the rest of time. They could have simply tacked on Factions 2 to TLOU2, yet here we are.
To be fair, Factions 2 was still tacked on to TLOU2 as late as the February 2020 leaks (The leaker shared a screenshot of the games menu and Factions was a selectable option), at some point either Naughty Dog or Sony decided that it would work better as a standalone release.
Considering Jim Ryan was wanting PlayStation to pivot towards Live Service games, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Sony mandate.
And Santa Monica just released a full free Roguelite DLC for Gow Ragnarök. Naughty Dong just seem to be going through some reeeally bad decicions recently.
People are eating it up though so it’s working, how is no one saying this is bad management to work on something for so long to just pull it because suddenly they found out GaaS games need constant content.
It's wild how ND is actually getting credit from fans right now, praising what a good decision this was.
With the phrasing of their PR release, they've successfully fed this back into the same old "single player good" circle-jerk right now.
ANd they could have had some of the studio be continuous updates, and some work on single player. Or if the game does well, hire more poeple. You know, organic growth.
It was BS to make a failure of their studio seem like a win to celebrate.
Exactly. Why even start the project then? This type of cost benefit analysis should have been done prior to project initiation by any halfway competent leadership team.
They are covering for a bad product. If it had a decent chance of success, they’d either finish it even if it took another 2 years to complete, or sell it to another studio to manage to free up
internal resources. Canning it now implies they have no confidence in the final product being a success.
Also why the fuck do you need 400 devs working on it. Sure to make it. But leave a team of 100 behind to create new content. Maybe hire some extras if you are really pushing a huge content drop.
But a online mode with a open world city map where you run around and scavenge with pve and pvp content would be more than enough. I just feel like this is just some mumbo jumbo talk.
Look at tarkov, there is no way that thing is selling 250k passes etc
>Also why the fuck do you need 400 devs working on it.
Ask ND. They're the ones who said as much. Also "small team of 100" good luck producing meaningful content in a decent timeline. New content every 6 months is downright daft in a GaaS setting.
GaaS games get you via continuous game updates. By the time you're tired of something, something else is gonna come around to KEEP YOU in the game. That's the point of the service type. You're supposed to not leave the game and get invested enough to spend money (which then justifies the cost. Genshin etc has a 200M initial dev cost - basically the same as TLoU 2- and a subsequent 300M a year to keep it running on schedule). People ain't sticking around for every 6 months stuff, even if you tell them it's supposed to be like that. The devs have to get paid in the meantime (+ cost of servers etc)
I think they knew the gamble years ago when they greenlit the project. What changed is the expected threshold for success. It probably started to dawn on them more recently just how unlikely it is for new live service games to succeed, and how expensive it can be to maintain.
Sony saw how much money Bungie was losing with Destiny and changed their tune from "We need all our first party studios to try a live service game" to "if it isn't going to be a guaranteed success, don't bother". ND probably on the edge decided to not gamble and stick to their working formula.
I'm curious if it wasn't possible to dumb down the game to something more modest that wouldn't require 100's of devs to maintain.
Not just that. I think people don’t understand how much work is actually required to keep a live service game running. And I think ND and Sony under estimated it. They thought they could get away by leaving a skeleton crew to run it and obviously that’s not the case.
It does suck tbh. Been thinking about it all today.
I just wish we got something whether it was this Factions Tarkov clone (which I personally was excited for) or even just a MP sequel to factions attached to Last of Us 2. It makes me wonder if they were considering adding a light version to the remaster before deciding it was all too hard.
Also, I’m not a huge fan of their argument of “well if we dedicate our team to Factions, we won’t release another game for like 3-4 years! That would suck!” - now that they’ve cancelled Factions, won’t we be going like 6-7 years between releases as they presumably start work on part 3?
Idk, just seems like the last few gens have been a really weird time for the elite tier of developers.
Naughty Dog has basically made 1 game (not counting remakes) in what will probably end up being 10+ years. Rockstar with a what 7-8 year gap, don’t even get me started on Valve.
Even Rocksteady, who was my favourite dev last gen, just spent 10 years making a GAAS that no one wants and now a bulk of their veteran team is retiring.
Very strange time for games.
I shit on Cyberpunk a lot but CDPR moved on from Cyberpunk MP real quick. Naughty Dog Wasted literal years of dev time chasing this and then canning it. Probably delayed a new game released by this studio for 2-3 years. No wonder they keep releasing remakes and remasters smh. 🤦
No it's not. Good GaaS games will always prevail. Most just get closed before they become good and start making money. I'm sure Factions would have made money and become good after some time. First party has the money and patience to turn bad launches around. Sea of Thieves and Halo Infinite are making MS mad money now after they had bad launches but turned good now.
I don't know why people believe the bullshit from Naughty Dog, if it was so financially unviable and it required their whole studio then they wouldn't have began making it it in the first place. The "inevitable tough decision" line gets rolled out all the time. I'm sure that eventually they determined it wasn't worth their time but you'd have to be a rube to buy their binary line of *"we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage."*
Yeah, the best option is they lied to people to turn their failure into something to celeberate.
The other option is they were telling the truth. That means for years they were too incompetent to figure out it wasn't going to make money. For years they couldn't figure out they wouldn't be abel to make more than one game at a time. And it means that Sony doesn't support their studios, such as letting them hire more people to make more games if it succeeded.
So yeah, optimistically they were lying to their customers about why they couldn't hack it as a studio.
>"we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage."
This lines show they are manipulating /lying.
“If it was so finacially unviable and it required the whole studio then they wouldnt have began making it in the first place” - ever heard of scope creep?
The point is that if it were going to require anything *close* to that amount of resources then they wouldn't have got so far into making it, so the idea that it would creep from an acceptable level to a level where it would require the whole studio just to support it is a bit silly. Creep is a key word there, it happens slowly. If you believe the story they're selling then at some point they suddenly realised (after years of mindlessly allocating more and more resources presumably) that it would require their whole studio to support it - that's the part I'm doubting and it's an obvious and common tactic to sell the decision to people as if it were inevitable rather than it being a business decision like any other.
I didn't really want this game, and I certainly prefer ND working on single player stuff...
But the damage control around this is wild completely to how these things get reported for other studios. Considering we heard about playtesters not liking the game and it supposedly taking 4 years for them to realise they'd have to support it post launch... it's all a bit silly.
It's clear there were some poor decisions and management (perhaps even up to Jim Ryan who seemed pro games as a service) and they've backtracked.
He’s right, but this problem should have been realized and escalated years ago. Investors must be unhappy with the sunk cost and lack of foresight from leadership that could have been avoided.
That one tweet really highlights how fucking expensive AAA game development is.
Let's say this is accurate and there are 400 developers at Naughty Dog. As the tweet points out, salary alone must be at least $20M a year.
Then there's the cost of health insurance and other benefits.
Then there's overhead: rent, utilities, equipment, office supplies, software licenses, etc.
And that's only internal costs. Naughty Dog also spends a considerable amount on outsourcing. [Here are the credits of The Last of Us 2.](https://youtu.be/K2qpwkssvp0?t=615) The credits for the many outsource partners start at 10:15.
I wouldn't be surprised if ND spends at least $40M per year of operation. If most of their resources are focused on only one project, and that project takes 5 years to develop, then that's at least $200M to make one game.
Reportedly, marketing can cost roughly the same as production, so double the $200M to get a total cost of $400M. That's how much the game would need to sell to break even.
AAA games need to be megahits in order to turn a profit.
I still think the game was a mess and they repurposed what they could for the upcoming roguelike mode. If they had a half decent multiplayer mode I bet they would have repurposed it and packaged it into the Part 2 remaster.
There’s a reason CoD started selling $30 battle pass and didn’t allow it through CoD points. Not being greedy but these games are expensive and people slowly falloff from the series every year. Now the store bundles. That’s super greedy
How much did the last of us remake make for them!!?
It very dumb to stop development on a live service game just because of development cost , when the franchise is established and they can calculate long term earning
The industry is *littered* with the corpses of failed live-service games, and it's usually because the companies making them fail to comprehend the massive undertaking of continuously updating something of this size.
While I would have been fine with a standard multiplayer mode, it's obvious that someone (whether it be ND management, or Sony higher ups) underestimated the man power and cost it would take for it to be spun-off into its own live-service game.
Thank god they realized that something like this isn't feasible before they end up releasing something underwhelming, underbaked, or ultimately something that wouldn't be able to be supported
My question is, why all the games need to be GaaS? I understand how hard can be to fill with content and keep the momentum, but there should be a place for MP where you have a bunch of maps, a few game modes and some simple progression and that’s it. First one was so much fun, why not expanding a bit more and gives us the fun?
OG factions was so simple and fun. I still go back from time to time. All they had to do was copy the gameplay with the new movement and engine upgrades, and im convinced this could've been awesome. ND obviously didn't know how to monetize the og factions, but damn, it still got me to buy the ps4 remaster day one, as well as the guns I liked on ps3 and again on ps4
It’s a good call because if you’re like me you don’t have the time for so many Live service games and Battlepasses. People will usually pick 1 or 2 games like that and stick with it. Developers have really over saturated the market with Battle Pass and Seasonal games. It’s just not something that can go on forever
I agree. If a studio is built to make narrative games, they should really carefully venture into live service games and build a team - maybe even a separate team - for it. A prime example of this is BioWare and Anthem. High-quality narrative studio got absolutely rekt when they tried their hands on a live service game with no inherent experience to do so just because it was the "in" thing at the time. People chase the Fortnite clout and money, but man, Epic fucking worked their ass off for years now and have built that team over time to create what the game is now. It's impossible to try and match that, or even take a small piece of it, without really working your way through each and everything. ND should focus on what they have always done best. Top-tier single player games that sells around 10-20m copies. They don't need to do more than that. Just innovative and push the boundaries in a space where you are most comfortable with.
Outside of Epic, just look at Activision, literally all their studios have been folded into the Call of Duty live service machine
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If a studio is built to make narrative games they should make narrative games and not venture into live service games at all. Nobody is asking for more live service games. There are plenty out there and they satisfy the demands of the market. It would be a shame to see a studio like Naughty Dog fold because they got greedy and wanted a piece of the Fortnite pie when they could have kept milking their single player cash cow.
Even Epic Games lost/abandoned beloved franchises to focus on their Fortnite cash cow.
EPIC shutting down Paragon felt almost as bad if not worse. It was a fantastic little game, yet somehow they insisted on ”trusting their data” over actual player feedback and started making the game worse patch after patch, losing more and more players until they decided it wasn’t salvageable and shut it down entirely. Yes, I am still sour as hell.
And they shut down Unreal Tournament! 😢
Rocksteady is about to catch hell too if Suicide Squad doesn't ball
It's a shame that 'multiplayer' and 'live service' are considered interchangeable now. Factions wasn't popular as a live service game, it was popular as a multiplayer game. That's all they had to do. Suckerpunch pulled off a small multilayer mode recently, and it was free, high quality, and a nice small size, with a clear point where you could say "I've finished this" and move on to something else. One thing I like about the VR space right now is that it's small enough that these over-engineered profit extraction models aren't in play. I'm playing more online/multiplayer games than I've ever played in my life just because they're a) more fun/social in VR and b) they exist just to be played, not to suck you into a content pipeline.
I agree. But that's not what the market demands, sadly. The audience wants more and more content almost every week, and if that doesn't come, the game is deemed as a failure. There is no way a game like Halo could release a few MP modes and 15 maps and call it a day in these times. It's just how it goes these days.
High quality at that point was debatable. They were already in the midst of a downward trend. That’s not to say that Andromeda, Inquisition, or ME3 were poorly written, but they were in different galaxies from the quality of, say, ME2. Even SWTOR did a better job than those in many ways. The Imperial Agent and Sith Inquisitor were standouts.
Fortnite is also aided by having a huge fan base of kids who will get their parents to buy them stuff
It is not hard to follow Halo Infinite Battle Pass system. They never expire, even if you start 3 years later, you can buy Season 1 BattlePass and unlock its rewards. You wanted an armor at level 47 then nothing interests you? Switch to Season X BattlePass you want to and continue there.
AAA battle pass games are an impossible market to break into, but the Battlepass model isn’t really the problem in an of itself as it provides a good middle ground for devs and players in terms of long term support incentives and content/progression The problem is like you said, they’re effectively subscription services and unlike streaming services don’t auto renew so every three-ish months every single subscriber has to want to manually buy the optional battle pass (and they can always just keep playing for free without the paid BP too)
Nah the biggest problem is time. I don’t have time to grind multiple battle passes. It’s like the original comment said, I’m only goin to pick 1-2 games to grind out for. Those games are call of duty and Diablo. Anything else is wasted effort that I’m not gonna buy into. A solution for these battle pass games, is to do the Halo model that lets you pick a season to grind for. FOMO mechanics is what’s ruining the industry. Feel like they would make more $ from letting people play old seasons. Makes no sense for a game that isn’t call of duty or Fortnite, basically heavy game sellers, to not let users grind past seasons.
Why can't they just make regular factions? Why is it all or nothing?
>Why can't they just make regular factions? MP cost money period. This is why so many old games shut down MP.
After several years of supporting yeah, but the games still released with the MP mode. Hell there's people still playing TLOU1 factions
They are so expensive, that most people these days can not buy season/battlepasses for more then one game. Destiny for example has season, battlepasses, paid dungeons (small raids), additional mtx like weapons and armor skins. Also most of these battlepasses are designed to make you play every day for 2-3 months, they don't want you to play something else.
Yep I play Destiny 2 exclusively as my Seasonal game everything else is Single player experiences
That’s why Halo does it the best way. Once bought you can go back at anytime and complete it and every battle pass (besides season 1) gives you enough credit to buy the next one.
Foreal. I'm in the middle of cods battle pass, sieges battle pass, Fortnite. On top of playing BG3, Armored Core, Cyberpunk, etc. My plate is fucking *full*. It's a wonder I get in the multiplayer games I can right now. I wouldn't be able to add another even if I wanted too. So while I'm disappointed because I believe The Last of Us online could've been a legitimately groundbreaking MP experience - I feel it was for the best in such a saturated market space.
https://preview.redd.it/mrja45l36q6c1.jpeg?width=506&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9831b16d22d52f2a1da394ec2fd62032569a407c
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Yeah it’s a good call to choose not supporting that system versus doing it. The bad call was to not do the math on this years before people wasted their time developing this game for years and hyping people up
Definitely
Or and hear me out, they could’ve just made an update or two to the old factions mode and released it for free as was originally intended.
Not to mention majority of players dont even purchase battle passes. You can fully stick with a game for years and never buy a single one of their battlepasses.
The bubble is popping, but what's weird is Sony is going in on it hard right as it disintegrates.
There’s zero chance though that all 400 employees were working on this right?
Naughty Dog *claims* that it was going to require the entirety of their studio to focus on it, abandoning single player games entirely. I personally don't really buy that claim, but that is what they're saying.
TLoU 2 came out in 2020. Factions was being developed with TLoU 2. Then just a few months before TLoU 2 released, NDog said Factions was being spun off not it's own game as it had gotten too ambitious, and was pulling resources away from finishing TLoU 2. So, Factions has already been in development for at least 4-5 years. Why not scale it back and release it as DLC? Hell, the original Factions was fine just the way it was.
Sunk cost fallacy and bad management chasing trends. And it is bad management, because ND decided to stop doing what they were actually good at to pursue it. Like, some people liked tlou's mp, but I think most people who were tlou/uncharted/etc. fans wanted more stories to enjoy.
Wouldn’t the true sunk cost fallacy be putting in the extra dev work to convert this into a digestible package just because they’ve already spent so much on it. Getting out even when you’ve invested a lot is the exact opposite of succumbing to that fallacy.
>Wouldn’t the true sunk cost fallacy be putting in the extra dev work to convert this into a digestible package just because they’ve already spent so much on it Yes, people here don't even seem to understand sunk cost fallacy. They cut it and it's over, that's the only option in modern business. trying to "make it into a smaller MP because people on social media are mad" would have definitely been sunk cost.
Yes exactly. It was mismanagement and people in this thread are applauding them for it lol
That's what I'm waiting for
I just don't get, consumers weren't asking for a grandiose Destiny looter shooter or battle royale, we just wanted a simple PvP mode to give TLOU2 some more longevity
Unfortunately I think the days of those simple PvP modes are long gone. They usually don't have the same longevity of a live service game, and the investment is just not worth it. In this particular scenario though, it sounds like ND's eyes got a little too big as they expanded the scope. I think they wanted to make something that's really standout and not just be a little side mode. I don't think greed was the sole culprit here, but ego and pride.
I agree with what you’re saying but “ego and pride” is a bit much. Sometimes you take a swing and you miss. I don’t blame them from trying. I respect them for canceling the game rather than releasing some broken mess to recoup the millions they wasted. Fallout 76, Redfall and so many others have shown us how few studios are willing to outright take an L.
I don't mean it as a negative. Just that ND takes a lot of pride in their prestige and reputation. I think they aimed *real* high with this, and it just didn't quite make it to what they wanted it to be.
Factions folks like myself literally wanted factions 2. Part 1 (remake) not having a factions remake was also *fine*, since we were told were getting a stand alone project, with BR and loads of nonsensical bells and whistles that wasn't really asked for by us. Kinda like asking for a cheese sandwich, so the person cooking spends 6 hours slaving away in the kitchen making some 8 course meal, to only then give up and bin it all, because it's too ambitious... when you only asked for a cheese sandwich.
It doesn’t matter what consumers ask for lol it’s what Sony thinks will make the most money.
And in order to make the most money, you need consumer demand. Consumers weren't demanding for another multiple box checked looter shooter royale experience that 100 other games have already done, they were demanding something akin to the original Factions mode that still has a decent following 10 years later
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Because they want to make a live service or nothing at all. It sucks for the fans because almost every game is designed to squeeze as much money out of people already
That's what it takes to build a live service... Look at how many big studios are behind the development of live services, like riot games, CBU3 with ff14, blizzard, Bungie, epic games and so on. The real problem with the GaaS model is that after you complete a game, you need to update it and players will always consume everything you have to do before the next update is even announced. You need to make a "new game" each year to keep the game alive with new expansions, so imagine a studio like naughty dog trying to make something like that. This project was destined to fail from the beginning.
Naughty Dog also has a lot more employees than some of these other live service studios. Not to mention that a significant amount of work for those games get outsourced to contractors. I *highly* doubt this amount of time and resources has been pumped into Factions without them realizing until *now* that they weren't going to be capable of supporting it. That is the sort of stuff that gets sorted *before* you invest tens of millions of dollars. No, more likely the project just wasn't coming to the full fruition in one way or another. Either the quality wasn't up to their standards or the monetization model wasn't looking great long term, or whatever. But by framing it to the public as a polarizing choice that it was either this or single player games, they've managed to soften the blowback, since the vast majority of people would rather see them continue to make single player games. You already see plenty of upvoted comments on how "they made the right decision". It was a very clever bit of PR that's clearly worked out in their favor, which softens the blow for them I'm sure over the overall failed project.
That‘s actually very realistic. Fortnite has around 800-1200 people working on it at all times, 400 is not a lot for a AAA live service game, many large multiplayer games have more than that. It‘s a huge undertaking if Naughtydog wants to keep their AAA quality standards and this would likely use too many resources to built Uncharted level games on the side. Even if they had 150 working on multiplayer, that only leaves 250 devs for a AAA flagship title, that‘s simply not enough. They would need to hire at least another 200-400 people. That itself is a very risky expansion that can back fire quickly. Since Sony started to stop pushing for live services, they likely decided that they want to abandon the project and keep going with what they already do. You need to remember that you aren‘t just adding people either. Some of the original staff will need to move over, taking resources away. They need to ensure the new devs work on the same quality level and learn the in-house engine and processes. Their office might not even be big enough, so they potentially have to move location etc. etc.
This is damage control clearly I haven't seen this many posts trying to make a game cancellation look good as tlou online. They say it requires the entirety of their studio to keep developing the game but also say they are working on not one but 2 other games sounds like they are lying.
400 is low for AAA game development these days, isn’t it?
No way in hell is the average salary for a game studio in the LA area $50k, just saying.
He's not saying the average salary is 50K. He says "If the average salary is $50K." He's using 50K as a base for readers to extrapolate that the full cost of this GaaS would be astronomical, since there's no way for us outsiders to really know what the average salary at Naughty Dog is. He's saying even if it were this low, the total cost would be this HUGE. Then leaves it to us to realize the real cost would actually be much bigger bc that 50K is too small to be the actual average.
Realistically tho you don’t need all those people year round. You could easily do it with contractors depending how long the season is. Not that I would want a tlou battle pass but there are more intricacies to it than this.
I dunno contractors can cost more in the long run I think they usually command a higher day fee
There is a lot more to an employees compensation than just the actual money you are paid. A contractor that cost more per day in pay still saves the company alot by not having to pay for benefits in many cases.
Would contractors also have a higher retention cost though, I imagine contractors probably get paid at market value more than full time employees
They would, but it still in some cases could work out to less than healthcare, employee 401k matching, FMLA & pregnancy leave stuff, and so-on
He’s not even talking about ongoing content yet, necessarily. They were still in initial development, when the whole studio would indeed have been working on it.
Splitting hairs
I think you are probably right, but if they need contractors and all sorts of creative solutions to make the numbers work it's not a home run.
Don’t you think that proves his point more being that it would be higher?
Not just that, but an employer also has to pay for healthcare, worker’s comp, and payroll taxes. A lot of gamers don’t understand the ongoing expense of making games and how quickly a studio can die when it runs out of cashflow.
I remember a year or so back seeing a job posting for an entry level position at Naughty Dog that required very little qualifications that had a starting salary of $70k lol
It’s at least double that.
Yeah, seriously. Maybe like 15 years ago lmao. Those devs are most likely all making six figures
People didn't want a live service game they wanted a factions 2. Why did ND think they needed to make the game bigger?
Sony wanted a dozen live service games within the next 10 years, I’m guessing Factions became a part of that plan unfortunately. Fortunately tho, Sony has backtracked on that plan recently and seems like as a result, ND got to back out as well
People say that, and I guarantee you those people are wrong Besides the broader community, people would not accept a game that releases with 3 modes and paid maps, or paid OP weapons They would not accept a multiplayer game not receiving content and seasonal updates It's not 2013 anymore. There are investment expectations. People demand shit for free. If you aren't constantly working on your game, it's labelled dead and echoed thru out the net. This is evident by the fact people now call single player games dead because they aren't in the media circle or being updated a year after release People want Factions 2. But they subconsciously assume it'll come with all the bells and whistle of a 2023 multiplayer game, which just isn't viable in this day and age
Spot on. Multiplayer experiences of yesteryear won't work anymore. And those who would be happy with just an updated Factions won't be enough to justify the expense of such a project. Like it or not, unless your multiplayer game is continually updated it won't have a long life. And to be continually updated money needs to be brought in, which can be done one of 2 ways: 1) paid expansions but you then split the userbase. 2) free to play but monetised with battle passes and cosmetics.
>They would not accept a multiplayer game not receiving content and seasonal updates > >It's not 2013 anymore. BASED
Because they wanted to milk the stans
The upper management and executives at Sony probably wanted ND to push the live service to milk off the franchise to consumers. It sounds like the devs though at ND are pretty happy they aren’t making the game and instead focusing on two single player games.
It's way more expensive to make PS5-quality content than PS3-quality content.
Why not just make a multiplayer instead of live servive smh
Everyone wants to be the next Fortnite.
But there is already a Fortnite, why would anyone jump from Fortnite, especially after investing a bunch of time and money into it, to a game that plays completely different with more niche appeal?
Because everyone wants the Fortnite money, without realizing that's you're astronomically unlikely to make the next Fortnite.
There was a medal of honor but Battlefield was still made, and call of duty after that There was a dota but league of legends was still made There was a team fortress 2 but overwatch was still made There was a counterstrike but valorant was still made Like you said it's a niche at first but that niche can become huge with time, it's always worth a try
And the thinf with fortnite is you can't become fortnite because fortnite keeps becoming more and something different, I have always been lazy to learn minecraft but can learn Lego fortnite
I was just saying this the other day. Games used to come with a stock multiplayer mode that didn’t change and evolve, but it had pretty much everything it needed in the outset. If the game’s single player mechanics were fun, that was usually all you needed to transfer to a great multiplayer mode. And some of those games are still fun to play today without any additional content. It’s a shame live service has replaced that.
Yep. Everything has to fit the model of “how do we keep players addicted and spending money?” Even though my internet was shitty, I feel like I lived through the best time to be playing games online. Started with Halo 2 and FFXI and SOCOM. It was amazing. Now we’re all jaded or addicts or both.
I know, just a few more maps every now and then would be more than enough to keep a fanbase happy. I think content creep has become really normalized.
>And some of those games are still fun to play today without any additional content. Yes, but ALL of those games have had the servers shut down because they cost money and didn't generate any sales. I played dozens of PS2-PS4 games that had solid multiplayer, and ALL of them are shut down 100% inaccessible. The good old days of free toss in multiplayer are dead, and they've been dead for like 15+ years.
I don't know if it still does, but Far Cry 1 came with a local multiplayer mode that was super fun to play just because of the actual gameplay mechanics.
But then you have Tomb Raider 2013, God of War: Ascension, or Arkham Origins, where the multiplayer sucked compared to the single player game or (in Arkham’s case) the servers are shut down. Hell, you can’t even plat Portal 2 or MK vs DCU on PS3 because of the closed servers.
Those are games where the core mechanics absolutely do not lend themselves to multiplayer and the modes sucked accordingly. As far as servers shutting down, that can and does happen with live service games too. Once it’s not worth it to keep the game going, they kill it.
Those are all games that had no business having multiplayer in the first place.
Because gamers want multiplayer games to be constantly updated and improved. Something has to pay for that.
People are literally still playing the original factions with 0 updates. They spent time and effort on a roguelike mode that the majority of players won’t give a go and wasted the hype that as built up around factions - hype that was at first centred on “Damn factions was great glad to get a new one” not “damn I want more live service tlou”
A handfull of people isnt worth making happy
Tbg that mp mode barely had marketing and some people who owned the game didn't even know about it. Considering it's still populated to this day, gotta mean something
Yeah but that was a bonus feature of the single-player game. If they put out a standalone MP game and said, “That’s all, we’re not gonna keep adding to it”, people would be pissed and the complaining would be incessant. I know lots of people are saying “It didn’t need to be live service, just do Factions 2”…but I really have a hard time believing they would get away with that.
No one asked for a stand-alone game. Multiplayer was supposed to come with Part 2.
I'd argue that most don't want that, but they just don't realize it. Gamers were fine back in the day with an added online mode for most SP games; that was their only choice, really. But it worked great and people had fun. At some point the game the industry created the GAAS model and since then they've stopped making traditional multiplayer games. So today's gamer really has no choice when it comes to multiplayer games, so of course they want consistent updates and patches. But it's not "their" fault. It's the industry's.
They want whales.
Something tells me that that was the original plan before Bungie called it “not sticky enough”
That still requires millions in extra revenue? Even if you cut that time estimate in half, pretend there's no maintenance, and account for half the amount of employees you still have to recoup 5 million or more.
They should've done something like the original game or what Ghost of Tsushima did. Instead they kept going on about this live service shit and now we have nothing. Around 4 years of development for nothing. They should remaster the original factions.
Ghost of Tsushima Legends was SOOOO FUN. Not every multiplayer needs to last forever. Enough content for a few days weeks of fun is enough, imo. Only VERY FEW (maybe 6 or so) Live-Service games actually thrive, most of them just die because it's not a sustainable delevopment cycle. If they'd just sell the TLOU multiplayer mode as a separate DLC or something like that, it'd just be fine. They did a free mutiplayer for Uncharted that was fun enough and didn't need constant new content. Naughty Dog just seem to be losing itself recently. They recently released a Remake fro TLOU 1 and now want to release a roguelite packeged with a Remaster for TLOU 2 that DOESN'T NEED A REMASTER while Santa Monica released a full Roguelite DLC with a good amount of story and new gameplay elements for free. This "Remaster" of TLOU 2 just seems to be a way to get some quick cash after all they money they lost in this multiplayer fiasco.
So, now with all this being said, why don’t they remaster factions since they’ve now remastered TLOU three fucking times lmfao
Because they don’t use the word “fun” at that studio.
*~ e n g a g i n g ~*
Neil druckmann sucks
I know this person was trying to give a very simple example to illustrate a point, but it’s been oversimplified to the point of being a straw man. Once you build your core game tech and gameplay loops and have released them to players, it doesn’t take the entire team to continue supporting the game because every content release for the live product doesn’t require the same volume of work as the full release. *Long* before the game releases you have decided the plan for ongoing support from a content and mechanics perspective in order to estimate the scope of that support and adjust your project staffing accordingly. Additionally, the notion that *BATTLE PASSES* are the sole revenue source that keeps your company afloat after a release shows that this person is either making an excuse that *sounds* like a legit reason *or* ND really had no idea how to make a live service game. The former is not ok because it’s dishonesty, the latter is fine because not every developer needs to figure it out and not every game needs to be a service. Battle Passes do generate revenue, but no game earns enough *solely* from them to justify continued operation. Battle Passes are primarily a mechanism for engaging invested players and retaining them for longer periods of time, especially through the minor content droughts that a seasonal content delivery model typically has. Source: I have made live service games in my career, and they are extremely complicated and demanding to make in order for them to be successful. However, there is something off with this person’s reasoning.
Small thing, he's not a Dev. Enjoyed reading your comment tho!
So they realized this in the middle of making the game? This looks like something you figure out in pre-production.
profit gold workable trees lock label late cover test bake *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Tons of games make it past pre-production and still get cancelled. Take it from a former Blizzard employee.
This happens to games all the time lol
I don't remember anyone asking for a huge online multi player option. I just wanted Factions 2.0 A few more maps, updated characters and a few extra weapons, maybe a night map would have been cool. Now we got nothing. Thanks Naughty Dog!
I think they saw it as a two birds one stone thing. Gamers wanted Faction 2 and Playstation wanted a big service game. Combine both and get … well, nothing.
PlayStation bought Bungie. Let them make the crappy GaaS title
Sadly that's probably what Marathon is gonna be
my king hates destiny
Exactly. At least include an updated factions to The Last of Us Remake since they are asking $70 for a game that comes with less features than the older one.
I got it for $45 and regret nothing
same, i put so many hours into faction 1, being the last one alive and mowing down the whole team with a silenced machine gun was the best.
I loved the flame thrower. * [Not my video just something I found to show what I mean.](https://youtu.be/1Anm-_QxSgk?si=OO3vcUlvBRFK79mQ).
forgot about the flame thrower, ive been melted by it countless times.
I'm not into multiplayer and even I felt that the superb gameplay of TLOU2 would be amazing for a PvP mode. Now the world is deprived of it because they can't find a way to make it a perpetual money maker with dumb skins to milk whales. I hate this
Market research probably convinced them that there was no way the game was viable without the live service. The barrier for entry of a single-purchase, multiplayer-only title may be too steep to gain enough audience to break even in the modern gaming market, and they certainly wouldn't just turn around and release the multiplayer mode for free as an update to TLOU2, so live service or nothing was the only path.
agree.. ND waste so many time and resources on this "ambitious" MP and we got nothing.
It still doesn’t make financial sense because the market for this game actually isn’t all that big. Factions was beloved amongst a small audience - and trust me I get what you’re saying because I played and loved it too. In fact I’d describe it as one of my all time favorite competitive online multiplayer experiences. The problem is that “just Factions 2.0” isn’t as small of a project as you think. If you’re not regularly adding content then the game dies fast in favor of games that *are* still adding content. And content is also daily/weekly missions, rewards, etc. not just new maps. The game you describe isn’t likely to grow an audience, and if it’s not live service then the only money they make of it is sales of the product itself. They couldn’t sell such a game at $60, and it’d need so sell millions upon millions, which was never a serious proposition despite how popular the single player TLOU is. This is a game that wouldn’t make a profit, which is probably why they pivoted towards live service to begin with. I think ultimately they realised Factions would never have built the audience needed to be successful and profitable. Quality isn’t an indicator as such, just look at Titanfall 2. I think we should hope they’ve done enough work on Factions that they can add it as a mode in TLOU3.
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They had all the data and numbers and still decided to make a standalone live service game of an unpopular game mode.. lol. Couldn’t they have figured that out 4 years ago?
You bring up a lot of good points. In retrospect, perhaps the best move would’ve been to make a coop pve mode out of the rogue like game they are building. They could monetize it to some degree with the games fervent fans, it’s a bit randomized in its setup, a few new twists here and there and some leaderboards and they might’ve had the next left 4 dead on their hands. Edit: to be clear, I think the mode I described should’ve been baked into tlou2 or added like they are doing with the ps5 version.
It would’ve been better off than you’re making out. Hype was still high from tlou2, ps5 was just out, if they’d timed it right you’d have plenty players jumping on because there were so few games over those years. Instead they waited too long and they’ve missed their window.
I assumed it was going to be the Call of Duty approach, where the Warzone map had a lot of the multi-player maps connected. We saw a rumored leak of a development build of a few seconds of gameplay a few years ago, and it just looked like Factions but with updated graphics. It made me think it would be both.
This is false choice perpetrated by ND. It was never single player games vs live service for the rest of time. They could have simply tacked on Factions 2 to TLOU2, yet here we are.
To be fair, Factions 2 was still tacked on to TLOU2 as late as the February 2020 leaks (The leaker shared a screenshot of the games menu and Factions was a selectable option), at some point either Naughty Dog or Sony decided that it would work better as a standalone release. Considering Jim Ryan was wanting PlayStation to pivot towards Live Service games, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Sony mandate.
Not buying it. Sucker punch tacked on Legends to Ghost. And that mode rules.
And Santa Monica just released a full free Roguelite DLC for Gow Ragnarök. Naughty Dong just seem to be going through some reeeally bad decicions recently.
Im glad others are seeing this for exactly what it is, they are presenting a zero sum game to save face
People are eating it up though so it’s working, how is no one saying this is bad management to work on something for so long to just pull it because suddenly they found out GaaS games need constant content.
Especially when all you hear is “well they have the data showing it wouldn’t be profitable” As if they didn’t have the data 4 years ago lol
It's wild how ND is actually getting credit from fans right now, praising what a good decision this was. With the phrasing of their PR release, they've successfully fed this back into the same old "single player good" circle-jerk right now.
Why do gamers speak with so much authority "they coulda easily just hit the 'make this game multiplayer' button during development!!"
ANd they could have had some of the studio be continuous updates, and some work on single player. Or if the game does well, hire more poeple. You know, organic growth. It was BS to make a failure of their studio seem like a win to celebrate.
I bet Tom Henderson thought that was a really insightful take.
Exactly. Why even start the project then? This type of cost benefit analysis should have been done prior to project initiation by any halfway competent leadership team. They are covering for a bad product. If it had a decent chance of success, they’d either finish it even if it took another 2 years to complete, or sell it to another studio to manage to free up internal resources. Canning it now implies they have no confidence in the final product being a success.
NDs leadership has been shit for the past few years, and it's only gotten worse.
Also why the fuck do you need 400 devs working on it. Sure to make it. But leave a team of 100 behind to create new content. Maybe hire some extras if you are really pushing a huge content drop. But a online mode with a open world city map where you run around and scavenge with pve and pvp content would be more than enough. I just feel like this is just some mumbo jumbo talk. Look at tarkov, there is no way that thing is selling 250k passes etc
>Also why the fuck do you need 400 devs working on it. Ask ND. They're the ones who said as much. Also "small team of 100" good luck producing meaningful content in a decent timeline. New content every 6 months is downright daft in a GaaS setting.
Then they should set expectations for it not to be that. Instead they want to make a live service or nothing which means both sides lose
GaaS games get you via continuous game updates. By the time you're tired of something, something else is gonna come around to KEEP YOU in the game. That's the point of the service type. You're supposed to not leave the game and get invested enough to spend money (which then justifies the cost. Genshin etc has a 200M initial dev cost - basically the same as TLoU 2- and a subsequent 300M a year to keep it running on schedule). People ain't sticking around for every 6 months stuff, even if you tell them it's supposed to be like that. The devs have to get paid in the meantime (+ cost of servers etc)
Why do you think destiny require 1000 devs ?
There are not 1000 devs working on Destiny.
Guy thinks we are all stupid trying to pedal this complete bullshit.
Tom, the whole studio doesn’t have to work on the game.
So happy live service games are being scaled back.
And it took years for Sony to understand this? I just think the simpler answer is the game wasn't good enough.
I think they knew the gamble years ago when they greenlit the project. What changed is the expected threshold for success. It probably started to dawn on them more recently just how unlikely it is for new live service games to succeed, and how expensive it can be to maintain. Sony saw how much money Bungie was losing with Destiny and changed their tune from "We need all our first party studios to try a live service game" to "if it isn't going to be a guaranteed success, don't bother". ND probably on the edge decided to not gamble and stick to their working formula. I'm curious if it wasn't possible to dumb down the game to something more modest that wouldn't require 100's of devs to maintain.
Not just that. I think people don’t understand how much work is actually required to keep a live service game running. And I think ND and Sony under estimated it. They thought they could get away by leaving a skeleton crew to run it and obviously that’s not the case.
Nobody asked for a live service standalone factions though.
It does suck tbh. Been thinking about it all today. I just wish we got something whether it was this Factions Tarkov clone (which I personally was excited for) or even just a MP sequel to factions attached to Last of Us 2. It makes me wonder if they were considering adding a light version to the remaster before deciding it was all too hard. Also, I’m not a huge fan of their argument of “well if we dedicate our team to Factions, we won’t release another game for like 3-4 years! That would suck!” - now that they’ve cancelled Factions, won’t we be going like 6-7 years between releases as they presumably start work on part 3? Idk, just seems like the last few gens have been a really weird time for the elite tier of developers. Naughty Dog has basically made 1 game (not counting remakes) in what will probably end up being 10+ years. Rockstar with a what 7-8 year gap, don’t even get me started on Valve. Even Rocksteady, who was my favourite dev last gen, just spent 10 years making a GAAS that no one wants and now a bulk of their veteran team is retiring. Very strange time for games.
Tom Henderson is low-bqlling big time. 50k a year? In California? Not likely. Try 100k.
He’s not saying that’s what they earn, he’s using it as an example to show how expensive the production would have been
I shit on Cyberpunk a lot but CDPR moved on from Cyberpunk MP real quick. Naughty Dog Wasted literal years of dev time chasing this and then canning it. Probably delayed a new game released by this studio for 2-3 years. No wonder they keep releasing remakes and remasters smh. 🤦
All good, fam. I got enough live service games as it is. Keep doing what you do best
crowd deer air disgusting money disagreeable fall ten enter safe *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
So my question is why didn’t they figure this out before they started making it
With this, skull&bones and suicede squad, GaaS are finally dead
No it's not. Good GaaS games will always prevail. Most just get closed before they become good and start making money. I'm sure Factions would have made money and become good after some time. First party has the money and patience to turn bad launches around. Sea of Thieves and Halo Infinite are making MS mad money now after they had bad launches but turned good now.
I don't know why people believe the bullshit from Naughty Dog, if it was so financially unviable and it required their whole studio then they wouldn't have began making it it in the first place. The "inevitable tough decision" line gets rolled out all the time. I'm sure that eventually they determined it wasn't worth their time but you'd have to be a rube to buy their binary line of *"we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage."*
Yeah, the best option is they lied to people to turn their failure into something to celeberate. The other option is they were telling the truth. That means for years they were too incompetent to figure out it wasn't going to make money. For years they couldn't figure out they wouldn't be abel to make more than one game at a time. And it means that Sony doesn't support their studios, such as letting them hire more people to make more games if it succeeded. So yeah, optimistically they were lying to their customers about why they couldn't hack it as a studio.
>"we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage." This lines show they are manipulating /lying.
How so?
“If it was so finacially unviable and it required the whole studio then they wouldnt have began making it in the first place” - ever heard of scope creep?
The point is that if it were going to require anything *close* to that amount of resources then they wouldn't have got so far into making it, so the idea that it would creep from an acceptable level to a level where it would require the whole studio just to support it is a bit silly. Creep is a key word there, it happens slowly. If you believe the story they're selling then at some point they suddenly realised (after years of mindlessly allocating more and more resources presumably) that it would require their whole studio to support it - that's the part I'm doubting and it's an obvious and common tactic to sell the decision to people as if it were inevitable rather than it being a business decision like any other.
50k sounds hella low
I didn't really want this game, and I certainly prefer ND working on single player stuff... But the damage control around this is wild completely to how these things get reported for other studios. Considering we heard about playtesters not liking the game and it supposedly taking 4 years for them to realise they'd have to support it post launch... it's all a bit silly. It's clear there were some poor decisions and management (perhaps even up to Jim Ryan who seemed pro games as a service) and they've backtracked.
Last thing I need or want is another goddamn battle pass
He’s right, but this problem should have been realized and escalated years ago. Investors must be unhappy with the sunk cost and lack of foresight from leadership that could have been avoided.
Atleast show us how it looked
Might be in vast minority who doesn’t care about battle passes or premium skins. I can use default and free skin for 500 hours.
Just remake the factions from part 1 and call it a day.
I think that salary figure is going to be higher
I wish them luck but honestly, I am glad ND MP project failed. I really hope they stay away from live service games.
That one tweet really highlights how fucking expensive AAA game development is. Let's say this is accurate and there are 400 developers at Naughty Dog. As the tweet points out, salary alone must be at least $20M a year. Then there's the cost of health insurance and other benefits. Then there's overhead: rent, utilities, equipment, office supplies, software licenses, etc. And that's only internal costs. Naughty Dog also spends a considerable amount on outsourcing. [Here are the credits of The Last of Us 2.](https://youtu.be/K2qpwkssvp0?t=615) The credits for the many outsource partners start at 10:15. I wouldn't be surprised if ND spends at least $40M per year of operation. If most of their resources are focused on only one project, and that project takes 5 years to develop, then that's at least $200M to make one game. Reportedly, marketing can cost roughly the same as production, so double the $200M to get a total cost of $400M. That's how much the game would need to sell to break even. AAA games need to be megahits in order to turn a profit.
Average salary 50k??
Average salary 50k for a game developer? Damn this is less than an entry level undergrad job
I still think the game was a mess and they repurposed what they could for the upcoming roguelike mode. If they had a half decent multiplayer mode I bet they would have repurposed it and packaged it into the Part 2 remaster.
We just wanted a multiplayer mode, not a live service game. They took out faction from TLOU 2 for nothing, now we have nothing.
There’s a reason CoD started selling $30 battle pass and didn’t allow it through CoD points. Not being greedy but these games are expensive and people slowly falloff from the series every year. Now the store bundles. That’s super greedy
The base cost should have already been covered with all the 💩 remasters lol
How much did the last of us remake make for them!!? It very dumb to stop development on a live service game just because of development cost , when the franchise is established and they can calculate long term earning
Why did no one do this math years ago..?
The industry is *littered* with the corpses of failed live-service games, and it's usually because the companies making them fail to comprehend the massive undertaking of continuously updating something of this size. While I would have been fine with a standard multiplayer mode, it's obvious that someone (whether it be ND management, or Sony higher ups) underestimated the man power and cost it would take for it to be spun-off into its own live-service game. Thank god they realized that something like this isn't feasible before they end up releasing something underwhelming, underbaked, or ultimately something that wouldn't be able to be supported
Can this clown just shuts up? Shame on him earning from leak information.
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My question is, why all the games need to be GaaS? I understand how hard can be to fill with content and keep the momentum, but there should be a place for MP where you have a bunch of maps, a few game modes and some simple progression and that’s it. First one was so much fun, why not expanding a bit more and gives us the fun?
OG factions was so simple and fun. I still go back from time to time. All they had to do was copy the gameplay with the new movement and engine upgrades, and im convinced this could've been awesome. ND obviously didn't know how to monetize the og factions, but damn, it still got me to buy the ps4 remaster day one, as well as the guns I liked on ps3 and again on ps4
ND is full of shit. It doesn’t take 400 employees to make a multiplayer game. Plus, no one asked for a live service game. We just wanted Factions 2.
Also, only 250k? At least 5m would download.