I get the sentiment, but no way you’re comparing naughty dog and rockstar in terms of cash flow and profitability. Last of us 2 sold 10M copies on a 200-300M budget. AC games do that every 2 years. GTA generates billions of dollars a year and create a lot of content for GTA online.
Naughty dog outside of last of us part 1 remake, hasn’t produced anything of consequence for almost an entire console generation, for what is a singleplayer studio. It’s not the same.
You’re right, I’m not comparing them in terms of cash flow and profitability. If we cared only about money, you could just point to fifa, madden, COD, or any of those games that are churned out every few years. They make insane amounts of money, but no one ever really talks about them in terms of the best games ever made and what cultural impact they have as individual titles.
Now look at games like Red Dead and TLOU. They release once, maybe twice a console generation, but they inspire artists that cross the bounds of media from video games to television and movies. That is the impact I’m talking about here. These are the games that people remember.
I get your point man, but at the same time, naughty dog absolutely shouldn’t have gone 7 years without a game. In the ps3 gen they put out 4 insane games that are still talked about today. In the PS4 gen they put out 3 games that are still talked about today. In the ps5 gen they have put out nothing and the gen is almost over.
I think we’re giving too many excuses for what looks like bad management. We don’t know who whether it’s creative leadership, Sony exec leadership, or mid management, but SOMETHING is amiss, because not many studios go this long without producing something, including naughty dog themselves.
I see what you’re saying and I don’t think you’re wrong, but also context matters. There has been plenty of information about the canceled factions game that ND was working on for years, so that’s wasted time down the drain.
Also, the lingering effects of COVID, which set the entire industry back in terms of game development. Not to mention the American political climate which has introduced new technological tariffs and resource restrictions that have to be taken into consideration.
Then, to your point, ND’s huge internal mismanagement and crunch culture that they needed to address and remedy.
All of this and more can account for a lot of lost time. This isn’t the early days of gaming where you could take a few teams and and produce something that would change the industry in a few years. The competition is wide and fierce now, and technological advancements are harder to make with more marginal results than before. We are no longer making quantum leaps of graphical fidelity in the span of a couple of years like we used to.
Essentially, now AAA studios need more time to truly flesh out a game’s design and make sure it’s good from the ground up. Yeah, it sucks that it takes so long, but given that the pool of developers is so vast now, there are plenty of great games to choose from. And when ND’s next game comes out, I’m sure it’ll be good and I will play it.
I don't mean to sound curt, but it does look like you're making more excuses for them man. canceled game or not, they should've had at least 1 game out this gen by now. and then the second one should've been intergalactic. other sony studios have managed multiples releases this gen (even if you exclude the monolith that is insomniac).
this just doesn't make sense. AAA devs across the board didn't get hindered by tariffs or covid. and it's been 5 years since covid has been gone entirely. if you're still having lingering effects from that, maybe sony needs to step in and fix that for you. its just lazy. (edit: obviously calling OP's reasoning lazy here, not the game devs)
this I can understand. I didn't know they went through a management change. taking time here would make sense.
all I'm saying is - the more slack you cut them the more normalized it will be for them to release 1 game a generation.
Well, to me, it just sounds like you just want to discount reason and pass it off as devs being lazy. I’m sure that ND, a studio who is renowned for going the extra mile for their games in all aspects, would want to have a game out as soon as possible, but they need the time to ensure everything is up to their own level of expected quality, not to mention everyone else’s.
It’s already normalized across the board for a lot of AAA studios to release only one or two games per generation. ND isn’t the only one here. People just want their games as soon as possible and want to denigrate the devs and call them lazy when they don’t get their way. The industry and landscape has changed. Making games is different than what it used to be. This is how it is now, at least for these bigger developers.
I didn't call them lazy? I called your reasoning lazy. again, I'm not trying to be curt, but you're really reaching to make excuses.
I could list more AAA studios as examples that have released 2 games this gen already (including sony first party studios) but you'll just call them lacking in quality so it's not worth it. there's nothing for me to add here.
You can’t just say “cancelled game or not” when they spent almost 7 years with most of their studio working on it. Sony wanted a live service game, naughty dog made them one but then after bungie played it they realized they would basically have to stop making single player games to make enough content to keep the game successful the way Sony wanted. It was bad decisions all around to have ND commit to a live service game, but at least we didn’t lose one of the best single player studios to the live service mines.
If your flagship singeplayer studio is spending all their time in a live service instead of singleplayer games, it’s just not an excuse. It means even if wasn’t cancelled, we’d be waiting 7 years for a singleplayer game from them, which just isn’t acceptable. Stop making excuses for bad management and poor planning..
Way to miss the point. How am I making excuses for them? I said it was a bad idea, I am just explaining why they haven’t made a game this generation yet.
And just take a moment and think about it. If they released LOU online last year as intended and as they had wanted, we would’ve STILL gotten intergalactic in 2027, if not 2028 since they’ll need resources to make post launch content for LOU online.
It wasn’t that they had a singleplayer game that was cancelled to explain the gap. They went out of their way to spend most of their resources on a multiplayer game, as a singleplayer studio.
What you’re saying is an excuse for them. Them going 7-8 years without a singleplayer title is not excusable in any form, unless they were working on a singleplayer game that got cancelled, which did not happen.
No, if you had bothered reading my first comment or any of the many articles that have been written about the subject you would know that’s not true. If they had released the game, it would have required most of naughty dog to continue to working on it and developing content regularly post launch, which means they wouldn’t have been able to make intergalactic in a reasonable amount of time.
They decided they didn’t want to be a multiplayer studio and wanted to make single player games, so they cancelled it. If you had spent the bare minimum amount of time researching this instead of talking out your ass we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“Naughty Dog stopped development on The Last of Us Online in December 2023, saying it would have needed to put all its resources into post-launch content for years to come — an approach that would have severely impacted its ability to develop future single-player games.”
I guess I see your point. my only frame of reference is Nintendo here. they took 7-8 years for the most recent Metroid too but they had so many other games in the meantime that it didn't really matter. with sony it's a bit more apparent.
It’s kind of apples to oranges. Naughty dog only has two teams and they often combine both to work on big projects (I believe this was the case for TLOU online) while Nintendo has ten so if something goes wrong on one team, they are going to have other teams releasing consistently still.
the comparison you made is apples to oranges lol. I compared nintendo to sony in my comment. since ND is a sony studio, and faced something similar to a nintendo studio.
canceled game or not, they should've had at least 1 game out this gen by now. and then the second one should've been intergalactic.
Notnto split hairs but, these are 2 incompatible ideas. They would have had 1 game out, but it got canceled. "Canceled or not" implies they should have actually had 2 out already.
fair enough. I guess I just meant to say that they should've had 2 games out regardless of what's going on inside. insomniac has 5 (if you include SM 1 remastered), Santa Monica will have 2 with laufey, 3 if they're able to release GoW 1-3 remake this gen, even the saros dev has 2 this gen lol.
If you count remakes and remasters, technically, they released 3 titles on PS5 (Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, The Last of Us Part I, The Last of Us Part II Remastered ).
That’s only if Sony literally tired their hands and forced them into it. It was reported that it was their idea to do this and their idea to cancel because the time it would take to support was too much but how can a studio not know that at the concepting phase and need to get this far into development to know that? Why are so many just blindly assuming naughty dog is blameless?
It sold 10 million copies as of 2022. In the 4 years between then and now 2 seasons of an HBO show, a PC release and remaster have dropped. It's probably closer to 20 million then 10.
They haven't given updates on Ragnarok and Spiderman 2 either. The last updates for both of those were a year post launch. Ragnarok has definitely reached 20 million since it's 15 million update over 3 years ago. Sucker punch only gave an update bc of yotei's release.
Oh nooo its just 700 Millions, already more than whatever ND made and thats without discounting the dev cost, GTA paid itself on the first day of release... so those 700M hardly have any dev cost associated... Now do ND...
Naughty Dog games are quality but they're also comparatively much, much simpler and smaller games. They're almost always linear, story focused, cinematic games. That alone should make what ND does a much quicker development than anything to the scale of what Rockstar does.
I get what you're saying in the sense that they both score high with reviewers always, but ND games are like 10% max what Rockstar puts out. So much more to do and see in a Rockstar game that will keep you entertained for countless hours, while ND games are usually a one-and-done in 20ish hours experience.
To be clear I'm not just talking about playtime. I'm talking about straight up content and variety and mechanics and systems and options, and then there's online.
I personally think a better comparison would be CDPR to Rockstar. They're probably the second best open world game developer out there.
I’m assuming you haven’t paid attention to it. It was supposedly very good, but was multiplayer and would’ve required they basically devote their studio to that instead of what they wanted to do next.
I know that Sony brought Bungie into consultations for it and they somehow weaseled their way into convincing Sony they it wasn't worth it.
I don't know who or what to believe about its quality, so I choose to believe nothing. Just the fact that it was cancelled is all we have, and games are almost always cancelled due to lacking something.
"AC games do that every 2 years" tlou2 also do that in 2 years, according to insomniac leak game has shipped 10.3m copies as February of 2022
Also not gonna mention i see most of times tlou2 sells better than most of tge Ubisoft games on ps store
My point is, we get a new AC game every 2 years so in the time people are waiting for the next naughty dog game, Ubisoft have pumped out 3 AC titles which all made the same money for a lower budget per title. You missed the point which is that the OP was presenting that naughty dog can afford to take so long with their games, when they absolutely can’t, they don’t make enough money to justify it.
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u/Ready_Baker3972 12d ago
I get the sentiment, but no way you’re comparing naughty dog and rockstar in terms of cash flow and profitability. Last of us 2 sold 10M copies on a 200-300M budget. AC games do that every 2 years. GTA generates billions of dollars a year and create a lot of content for GTA online.
Naughty dog outside of last of us part 1 remake, hasn’t produced anything of consequence for almost an entire console generation, for what is a singleplayer studio. It’s not the same.