Bungie talked Naughty Dog out of making The Last of Us Online says ex-Sony boss

Former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida has said that he has played The Last Of Us Online and it was ‘great’, plus it was Naughty Dog’s idea to make it.

The cancellation of a Naughty Dog game is not something you’d normally expect to be celebrated but very few fans were upset to hear that The Last Of Us Online was being canned, back in 2023.

All that was ever shown of the game were a few pieces of concept art and it was never made clear what it actually was, although the obvious assumption is that it was an extension of the well-regarded multiplayer mode Factions for the original The Last Of Us.

It was in development for some time and the implication was that it had got to a playable state and now former President of SIE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida has confirmed he played it, and it was ‘great.’

Unfortunately, he wasn’t any more descriptive than that, so we still don’t know what the game was. However, Yoshida did offer some insight into how and why it was cancelled.

‘The idea for The Last Of Us Online came from Naughty Dog and they really wanted to make it,’ he told Sacred Symbols+, via Push Square.

‘But Bungie explained what it takes to make live service games, and Naughty Dog realised, ‘Oops, we can’t do that! If we do it, we can’t make Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.’ So that was a lack of foresight.’

Yoshida added that, as far as he knows, no first party Sony studio had been forced to make live service games and it was more a case of them seeing where the company was going and making their own pitch, before something was forced on them.

‘From my experience, when studios see the company has a big initiative, [they realise] riding on that gives them a better chance of getting a project approved and supported,’ he said.

Nevertheless, it seems likely that he’s giving a rather diplomatic description of the drama surrounding the game’s cancellation.

Even ignoring the rather churlishly worded announcement from Naughty Dog, in which they insisted their only choices were to be ‘a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player’, it was reported that Bungie had given the game a negative internal appraisal some months earlier.

Yoshida seems to confirm this in his comments, but at the time it was also said that after Bungie’s appraisal, the development team was downsized as the game was re-evaluated, which can’t have gone down well with Naughty Dog.

As if to confirm that, a few months later it was reported by sources that it was not a ‘bloodless endeavour’ and that there, ‘were some heads rolling at Sony’ as a result of the cancellation.

Since leaving Sony, Yoshida has been more open about his time at the company, revealing that he was forced out of his role as President of SIE Worldwide Studios by former Sony boss Jim Ryan.

Ryan himself left the company not long after and it’s still unclear whether that was entirely his own decision and whether he was the one that was pushing for more live service games or if he was against them, and that’s why he left.

For that matter, it’s not clear what that position is of any of Sony’s current execs, who have pointedly said as little as possible about the subject in public.

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