The Last Of Us Online Cost PlayStation
The Last Of Us Online Reportedly Had Most Of Naughty Dog Working On It, Cost "Hundreds Of Millions"
It's safe to say that PlayStation's big live service initiative has been a bit of a disaster. Sure, we've seen successes like Helldivers 2, but we've seen far more cancellations before the games could even get out of the door. Bluepoint was shut down thanks to the cancellation of its live service God of War game, Concord was a disaster, and now the fate of Guerrilla's live service Horizon game is up in the air.
However, easily one of the most disappointing live service game cancellations was the complete scrapping of The Last of Us Online. It was officially scrapped all the way back in 2023, before Naughty Dog eventually moved onto multiple remasters, and then we saw the announcement of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
After it was canceled, we started hearing more about how great the game would have been and how far along in development it was, but we didn't hear much about just how massively the game hit Sony's bank account, and how much resources the company had invested.
The Last Of Us Online's Cancelation Cost Sony "Hundreds Of Millions"
Thankfully, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier dished out some details in his latest video, which went over PlayStation's disastrous live service strategy. In the video, Schreier talks about what exactly happened at Naughty Dog, and really outlines just how much of a massive project it was for the studio.
"Naughty Dog, of course, spent a ton of time and a ton of money, hundreds of millions, working on a Last of Us Online project," says Schreier. "It started off as a small thing, and they wanted to make it a bigger thing, and eventually it turned into a service game, and they canceled it in 2023 for a variety of reasons."
Schreier then goes on to kind of debunk the idea that this was a Naughty Dog side project too. He claims that the majority of Naughty Dog was working on The Last of Us Online or the Last of Us remasters for PS5, and only until the former's cancelation were people then brought over to Intergalactic to start working on that. It's also the reason why Naughty Dog hasn't released a new game in 6 years.