Naughty Dog cancels "The Last of Us Online"
The ambitious multiplayer project for "The Last of Us" has been officially cancelled. The Playstation development studio Naughty Dog wants to concentrate exclusively on single-player games from now on.
In a blog post, Playstation studio Naughty Dog announces the end of "The Last of Us" multiplayer project. The company writes: "We know many of you have been waiting for news on 'The Last of Us Online'. There's no easy way to say this: we've made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on this game."
The game was originally planned as a multiplayer mode for "The Last of Us Part II", which was released for PS4 in 2020. As development progressed, the team's ambitions grew and the small multiplayer mode evolved into a huge, standalone live-service game: The Last of Us Online. In an interview with Geoff Keighley last year, studio boss Neil Druckmann said: "The game is big. Maybe even bigger than our single-player games. And the way we tell the story is unique".
Over time, Naughty Dog said it had to realise that these ambitions had become too big. In order to provide "The Last of Us Online" with regular content after the launch, the studio would have had to deploy a large proportion of its employees. This would have significantly affected the development of single-player games. The company writes: "So we had two paths ahead of us: become a pure live-service studio or continue to focus on narrative-driven single-player games that make up the Naughty Dog legacy."
The learnings and technological advances the studio made during the development of "The Last of Us Online" will be utilised in future projects. Several single-player games are currently in development at Naughty Dog.
Source: Naughty Dog
A turbulent development phase
In May of this year, it became known that the development of "The Last of Us Online" was not running smoothly. Bloomberg reported that Naughty Dog had massively downsized the multiplayer team and transferred many team members to other projects. The reason for this was an internal evaluation of the project by the live-service development studio Bungie, which was acquired by Sony in July last year. The 'Destiny' developers questioned the potential for long-term user engagement in the multiplayer game. Naughty Dog responded by assuring fans in a post on X that development on the game had not been cancelled, but that the game simply needed a little more time. In October the online magazine Kotaku reported that Naughty Dog was laying off around 25 part-time employees and had de facto "put the multiplayer project on hold".
Sony has invested heavily in the development of live-service games in recent years. The company had a total of twelve multiplayer games in the pipeline last year - ten of which Sony wanted to release by March 2026. However, the expansion plans into the live service world have not yet gone as planned. In addition to the cancellation of "The Last of Us Online", the company recently had to admit in an investor call that half of the announced live service games will be postponed following an internal quality evaluation.
Cover image: Naughty Dog
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