We know many of you have been eagerly awaiting information on the project we call The Last of Us Online. There’s no easy way to say it: we’ve made the extremely difficult decision to stop development of this game.
We know this news will be difficult for many to accept, especially the dedicated The Last of Us Factions community, who have eagerly followed our multiplayer ambitions. We’re just as devastated as we were excited to get this game into your hands. We wanted to explain to you how we arrived at this decision.
The multiplayer team has been in pre-production on this game since we worked on The Last of Us Part II – and wanted to create an experience that we felt was unique and had huge potential. As the multiplayer team developed their concept for The Last of Us Online, their vision crystallized, the gameplay became refined and more satisfying, and we were excited about the direction we were taking .
As we moved into full production, the scale of our ambition became clear. To release and support The Last of Us Online, we needed to dedicate all of our studio resources to supporting post-launch content for years to come, which would have had a huge impact on the development of future single-player games. We therefore had two paths open to us: become a studio exclusively dedicated to online games or continue to focus on the single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s legacy.
We are immensely proud of everyone at the studio who participated in this project. The learnings and technology investments learned from this game will carry over into how we develop our projects and will be invaluable to the direction we take as a studio. We have more than one ambitious new single-player game in development at Naughty Dog, and we can’t wait to share more about what’s to come when we’re ready.
Until then, we are incredibly grateful to our community for the support they have given us throughout the years.