The Last Of Us Multiplayer Game Canceled, Naughty Dog Will Focus On Single-Player Games

The Last of Us multiplayer venture, which Naughty Dog says it had been calling The Last of Us Online internally, has been canceled. The studio revealed the information in a weblog put up, citing the sport’s ambitions as being so huge that it could require the complete consideration of the studio, thereby taking any a part of the staff off of narrative-driven single-player video games, the likes of which have been Naughty Dog’s M.O. thus far.

“In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear,” the assertion reads partly. “To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games. So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.”

The destiny of The Last of Us Online has appeared unsure for a while now. Earlier this yr, it was reported by Bloomberg that growth on the venture had slowed down, with a lot of its builders shifting to different tasks inside the studio. Naughty Dog responded to that report in a press release on-line, saying it was “proud” of the work that had been achieved thus far and confirmed the event of a brand new single-player sport, too.

In October, we realized that Naughty Dog had laid off roughly two dozen contractors in accordance with a Kotaku report. That identical report mentioned that The Last of Us multiplayer venture was “basically on ice at this point.” The sport was as soon as envisioned as certainly one of a number of forthcoming multiplayer video games from Sony, because the usually story-driven writer seeks to compete within the busy live-service house. But simply weeks in the past, we realized that Sony had already enormously decreased its anticipated output in that enviornment, with the corporate chopping in half its variety of in-development live-service video games deliberate to debut in March 2026 or sooner.

It’s unclear precisely which different video games have been pushed out of that window or canceled outright, and it is fairly seemingly a few of them had been by no means introduced within the first place.