LectureMaster
Or is it just one of Adam's balls in my throat?
The Massive Blunder That Sidelined PlayStation’s Best Studio: Why Naughty Dog Got Benched After COVID
Sony's best first-party studio hasn't published a new game for almost a decade, and that's a problem.
For decades, Sony first party studio Naughty Dog absolutely dominated the conversation when it came to triple-A console gaming. The studio's talent for creating expressive, endearing, beloved characters and putting them in deadly jungles (there's almost always a deadly jungle), gorgeously rendered at the absolute technical limits of whatever the hardware of the day could manage, has long been the envy of game developers everywhere. It's fair to say that the studio's output has been instrumental in the establishment and ongoing success of Playstation as a platform synonymous with the big budget single-player action-adventure.
So where the hell was it last week? At this most crucial of Not E3s, very possibly the penultimate one before the hype cycle starts in earnest for the next generation of consoles, we haven't heard a peep out of it, or seen any proof of life of its upcoming new IP, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. And so it seems increasingly and frankly alarmingly likely that one of Sony's biggest draws is going to end up sitting out current gen entirely, bar the concessional remakes and remasters that came out back when PS5 was essentially just a Fabergé PS4.
This has, I think, contributed massively to the perception that the PS5 has no games. Which patently isn't true: aside from the fact that gaming generally is enjoying one of its most bountiful release calendars since the gluttonous days of the Xbox 360 era, Sony's other first party studios have massively stepped up to fill the big Uncharted-shaped hole in PS5's lineup. Insomniac alone will have delivered Miles Morales, Spider-Man 2, Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart and Wolverine before we even know what PS6 looks like. We'll have had two mainline God of Wars from Santa Monica Studio, Team Asobi has deftly established Astro Bot in the pantheon of great console mascots: there's so much great work being done. I could go on listing things, but after a long time where it felt as though the PS5 was spinning its wheels, even the most hardened cynic can't deny that the 10th gen has now, finally, picked up some momentum. Well, they can, but not with any credibility.
But there's no denying the fact that this is an era of many blunders, whichever platform or publisher you look at, and one of the most significant of these is the industry's pervasive obsession with Games as a Service. A mad, decade-long scramble where everyone and their dog wanted to make the next Destiny, or seemed obligated to even if they didn't. Even Naughty Dog, a studio so keenly devoted to its signature craft of cinematic action adventures, got caught up in this folly.
Sony wanted its own Destiny so bad it even bought the Destiny studio. For a ludicrous amount of money. And it's not making Destiny any more, which, I dunno, I'm not a "business guy" but… not having Destiny is an outcome every other publisher arrived at without spending three-billion dollars.
Over the years, but particularly from the start of this decade, Sony has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on live service, culminating in a huge, slate-wide pivot following the COVID boom where the firm infamously reinvested billions of that macabre windfall into projects that have, just as infamously, fizzled out or flopped so dramatically they've become instant memes for publisher hubris.
And this trend is part of the reason why Naughty Dog just doesn't seem to have done anything for the last five years or so. The Last of Us Online, something that had been in the works for around seven years when it suffered a surprise cancellation in 2023, soaked up so many of Naughty Dog's resources that it gummed up their development pipelines.
In fairness, The Last of Us Online isn't the silliest idea by half. Though multiplayer isn't the first thing anyone associates Naughty Dog with, it's something the studio has done well at in the past: the old Uncharted games and the original The Last of Us all had popular online modes that were generally well liked by anyone who tried them out.
The Last of Us Online would have effectively been TLOU 2's multiplayer, spun-off and expanded into a full, standalone release. It was revealed in 2019 that the project's ambition and scope had far exceeded that which could be reasonably expected of a bundled deathmatch mode. Reading between the lines, this rather suggests that feature creep may have been a factor in its long development cycle.
But that doesn't mean it was doomed to fail. Who knows what might have been? The stratospheric rise of TLOU as a hot property following two blockbuster games and an acclaimed HBO show would, surely, have given it a curiosity advantage had it ever come out. And, if it had the juice, people would have stuck around: we might well be having a much different conversation about Naughty Dog right now had it persevered with it. I would be sitting here complaining about how TLOU Online's success ruined Naughty Dog, because, while I can appreciate the appeal of a good online game from an academic perspective, I personally feel that the least desirable feature in any video game is the presence of other people.
And that's not baseless conjecture on my part: when the decision came to axe The Last of Us Online in 2023, the reasons cited were concerns that the studio simply didn't have the resources to spend on launching and maintaining a live service game while also continuing to make the single-player action adventure tentpoles it is known for. That the people there, presumably, wanted to continue making more than anything else.
So, that's a massive, well-documented part of the story here: Naughty Dog lost the best part of a decade on an all-consuming multiplayer project that never came out. Given how much the bottom has fallen out of the whole live service ecosystem in the years since, cancelling it is, at least, the second most prudent move they could have made after simply not pursuing the idea in the first place.
The other factor here is that, over the years, Naughty Dog's top brass have been whittled down, constituting a huge brain drain. In 2023, former Head of Technology Christian Gyrling left for Meta: he oversaw the firm's technology pipelines, the ones that made it such a powerhouse for showing off the capabilities of Sony's hardware. Evan Wells retired at around the same time: he'd been co-president of the firm through its most successful eras and before that, one of its top game designers. Bruce Straley, co-director of Uncharted 2, 4, and The Last of Us, who would almost certainly be Neil Druckmann's right-hand man on Intergalactic had he not left to start his own studio in 2017.
amy hennig was a huge loss for the studio's talent pool
And, it would be remiss to talk about Naughty Dog shedding talent without mentioning Amy Hennig, creative director of the original Uncharted trilogy, who left under reportedly tense circumstances back in 2014, later citing burnout among other factors. But she was crucial to establishing the Naughty Dog house style that I would argue carried them right through to The Last of Us Part 2.
This leaves Neil Druckmann, the firm's most senior creative, as top guy at Naughty Dog, and given how much of his time was being spent over at HBO until recently, I think it's fair to question whether he's been a bit of a bottleneck for decision making: this happens all the time at creative firms. It's well known, for example, that his counterpart over at Bethesda Studios, Todd Howard, signs everything off personally like a Vault Overseer, which probably contributes a lot to the painfully long development cycles they are associated with.
There are no easy answers as to why big companies make the decisions they do: no one single factor can account for Naughty Dog's absence at this year's Advertisement Bonanza. I mean, Intergalactic might get Beyonce Dropped at the next State of Play and make me look like a proper turnip. Stranger things have happened.
neil druckmann is a busy guy
It's a great shame that a confluence of factors has conspired to bench Naughty Dog at a time where it should be thriving and dominating. To think we might never get to see what that studio running on all cylinders could accomplish with a project built for the PS5 and PS5 Pro is yet another unforgivable sin of this industry's obsession with squandering its most talented teams on things they are not best positioned to make. From Naughty Dog to BioWare, from Bethesda to Bluepoint, it's seemingly never enough to be great, brilliant, or even completely unassailable at just one kind of thing.
I've said this many times now but it's a hill I'll die on: the fact that the PS5, this many years in, doesn't have its own Uncharted game is a scandal. That's like Sonic skipping the Sega Saturn. That's like paying Hulk Hogan to sit at home. Unconscionable things that have happened because someone somewhere along the line was really shit at doing business.
Sony could have put one of their mid-card studios on a Sully prequel and printed money. Put the Days Gone lads on a sepia-toned Uncharted with big moustaches and flared trousers. It'd be rubbish, but I'd buy it, 'cos I'm a mark for games about guys who climb stuff while doing quips, and so are half the people reading this.
In answer to the question, "Where the hell is Naughty Dog?": that's easy. Santa Monica, California. And what it's doing there, undoubtedly, is cooking. Getting ready to make a huge comeback potentially on the next PlayStation. Building its expertise, its talent, and those crucial technical pipelines back up again ready to re-assert itself as king of the blockbusters for the next phase of triple-A. Games that actually shift consoles (what a concept!). Whether this hit-making institution can get back onto its perch, or surpass it, remains to be seen. With the best will in the world, it's not the same studio that it was during its golden era. I just hope it emerges strong from its current abyss.
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