The video game industry is in obvious difficulty: even large studios like Naughty Dog are in fact forced to make mass layoffs and to postpone or “freeze” titles in development.
As reported by Kotaku, it seems that also the highly anticipated The Last of Us Multiplayer (initially known as Factions) may meet this sad fate.
There would have been numerous Naughty Dog employees involved in the project who received it dismissal notices and close contract expiry (we are talking about the end of October 2023).
We saw that, over the summer, the project had been put on the back burner and numerous Naughty Dog employees involved in TLOU Multiplayer had been reassigned to new projects, but now things are definitely getting more worrying.
It is certainly surprising that, after the enormous success of the HBO TV series based on The Last of Us, Naughty Dog has decided to make post-apocalyptic Multiplayer the “sacrificial victim” for this complicated period of the entire gaming industry.
The crisis period therefore continues for Nuaghty Dog and beyond: we have seen how, in recent months, entire studios such as Volition have collapsed under the weight of what seems an unprecedented sector crisis.
