The Last of Us' multiplayer game has been cancelled

We barely heard a thing from The Last of Multiplayer, The Last of Us Factions, The Last of Us Online or whatever you want to call it after it was officially unveiled back in June, 2022. Some more concept art was released at the very start of this year, but that didn't stop multiple very believable rumours about the project being in trouble from surfacing and continue to grow. One of the game's director gave fans some hope that it was still alive last month. Turns out, he was stretching the truth a bit.

Naughty Dog confirms The Last of Us Online has been cancelled, and kind of acknowledges that part of the reason for this is the thoughts Bungie shared after seeing the project and their plans for the future. I say that last part because we're told the official reasoning for cancelling the project is that:

"In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear. 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 kennel basically didn't want to dedicate most of the developers to support this live-service game (especially after PlayStation Studios drastically downsized its live-service game initiative), as this would obviously lead to them stop making the world class single-player games we love them for.

Not that this multiplayer project has been time, money and efforts down the drain. I've been told the production of this project has allowed Naughty Dog to make several improvements to its engine, production planning, come up with cool gameplay mechanics and more that will benefit the several single-player games the studio is working on right now. Still, I'm definitely disappointed that we won't get to see a semi-open-world The Last of Us Factions. How about you?