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With all of the controversy surrounding Bungie’s layoffs recently, its wider business practices have come under the spotlight. It turns out, according to Jason Schreier, that it had been involved in peer-reviewing The Last of Us: Online, leading to Naughty Dog not going all-in on a live-service title. Ironically, this is one of the precepts that forced Bungie’s mass restructuring.
Schreier began by alluding to the fact that “Destiny 3 was not cancelled because it was never in development.” The topic quickly shifted away from this idea, and instead focused on “how a studio that hasn’t made a good game since 2010 (Halo Reach) can tell Naughty Dog (a studio that makes critically acclaimed games) to cancel a project,” as FarhaanBBR put it.
The Bloomberg reporter then went on to say that “Bungie gave Naughty Dog feedback that Naughty Dog found extremely helpful when making what was likely a very smart decision to not go all in on a live service game.”
In May 2023, Schreier published an article for Bloomberg stating that the “‘Last of Us’ multiplayer video game faces setbacks at Sony,” and there was a specific line stating the following:
Schreier’s tweets go on to point out examples of “single-player studios pivoting to make service games such as Anthem, Suicide Squad, Marvel’s Avengers, Redfall, and so on,” suggesting that there should be no outrage at TLOU: Online’s cancellation.
Bungie has been working closely with Sony’s entire portfolio of games and offering consultancy on live-service production. Ironically, Bungie has now folded under its own weight. It said:
Despite Bungie’s own warning that creating convincing live service games is hard, it continued to pile forward with Destiny 2 and Marathon, alongside its other projects, ultimately forcing its hand with mass layoffs. Who could have seen this happening.