I wouldn’t want to bank my whole studio on one title being a blockbuster success either.
I’m not convinced any online-only games are worth anyone’s time if they’re planned as a live service game from the get-go. When Halo: Infinite F2P multiplayer dropped, so many people on the Halo subreddit were like “yeah, it’s fun but the battlepass is so slow to progress that I feel like I don’t have a reason to keep playing.” Uhhhhh maybe keep playing because you’re having fun? Or do you need some artificial number to tell you to keep going?
Seems like a confusing shift in the target demographic where battlepasses and constant new updates are required in order to consider a game “worth your time.”
squeaky old man voice back in my day my brothers and I would play CoD: Zombies using the exact same strategies every day after school for years with no updates to the gameplay AND WE LIKED IT
Makes sense. The world moved on from Unreal Tournament for better or worse. You can’t just release and leave an online-only game any more. It has to be supported with years of content, or it’s never going to be popular and make it’s money back.
I’m going to guess it was always a small team ticking over in the background of Naughty Dog anyway. Their minute to minute gameplay is solid, but their stories and bombastic set-pieces are much more interesting and separate them from a crowd of pretenders.
There are actually still people playing the original Unreal Tournament from 1999 on public servers. I occasionally jump on one of them and it’s still the glorious chaos it always was!
Yeah, it’s still there, but it’s from a different era. If Naughty Dog could make TLOU Online for $2 million like UT was developed for, they’d have just done it. I suspect they’ve spent more than that just on market research, and the answer has been “gamers aren’t really interested”.
I mean, I like the TLOU and Uncharted games, honestly don’t think Naughty Dog has ever released a bad game since the PS1, but I can’t see my self playing some online multiplayer only bullshit version of it. The players that do want that have already got enormously successful games that they already play. Muscling one of them out of contention seems like a monumentally hard task for a small team to do.
I have hard time believing they had this great product they just didn’t want to support for a few years. Specially with how Sony has been dead set on having many live service games in its portfolio.
Controversial opinion but I actually am kinda sad to hear this. I remember really liking the OG Factions multiplayer games in TLOU 1. It was really refreshing at the time for multiplayer shooters, since you needed a lot of tactics and teamwork to get resources in order to craft tools and take out their other team. Really nerve-wracking, engaging gameplay at the time. And since you had one life per round, you couldn’t just run and gun like in CoD/BF.
I know that the multiplayer game they were coming out with wasn’t like this, but I would’ve been happy to play Factions again and relive the old days. Probably one of the last games that I’ve really enjoyed a multiplayer shooter.
Must’ve been because it required more effort than releasing the same thing over and over for full price with a new coat of paint