The Last of Us Online officially cancelled by Naughty Dog

Following reports that development on Naughty Dog's long-awaited The Last of Us multiplayer game had been "slowed down" earlier this year, the studio has announced it's officially pulling the plug on the project, saying it didn't want to become a "solely live service games studio".

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us multiplayer game was initially planned to be part of The Last of Us Part 2, but the studio announced it was separating the two halves in 2019. After years of relative silence on its progress, Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann emerged in January to confirm more would be revealed "later this year" - but instead, May brought the news the project needed "more time".

Shortly after, a report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier claimed Destiny developer Bungie - which had been individually assessing many of Sony's "games as a service" projects since being acquired by the company - had raised concerns about The Last of Us multiplayer's "ability to keep players engaged for a long period of time", resulting in Sony scaling back the team to only a "small group" while it evaluated the project's direction.

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