Today Naughty Dog announced that its The Last of Us Online multiplayer game has officially been canceled to make room for single-player development.
In the announcement, made on the studio's official blog, we read that the folks at Naughty Dog realized that to properly release and support the game, they'd have to put all of their resources behind creating post-launch content for years to come.
Placed in front of the choice of "becoming a solely live service games studio" or continuing to focus on the single-player games that define Naughty Dog's production, the studio has picked the latter option, leading to the online game's cancellation.
That being said, we also hear that Naughty Dog has "more than one ambitious, brand new single-player game" in development, and the know-how and technology created for the online game will still be valuable for future development.
That being said, the studio isn't yet ready to reveal what they're currently working on, besides the focus on single-player.
The game was originally announced in 2019 in the months before the release of The Last of Us Part II. Since then, we have only seen a few teaser pictures and we heard that it was "a fresh, new experience from the studio, but one rooted in Naughty Dog’s passion for delivering incredible stories, characters, and gameplay."
Unfortunately, it appears that we'll never know what that vision will entail.
While Naughty Dog had promised news to come later this year, it then delayed the game, explaining that it needed more time to mature. That's also when we first heard about a single-player game in the works, albeit at that time, only one was mentioned.
This comes as Sony has been revising its plans for live-service games, cutting down to 6 the number of titles within the genre it intends to release by March 2026. The original plan involved 12 new games by that time. Bungie also suffered a large wave of layoffs in the process, leading to the delay of Destiny 2's expansion, The Final Shape.
