A majority of the development team at Naughty Dog wasn’t working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet until after The Last of Us Online was canceled, according to a new report.
Speaking in a new video, Bloomberg investigative journalist Jason Schreier discussed Sony Interactive Entertainment’s troubled live service initiative and argued that one of its biggest problems was the company’s attempt to push traditionally single-player-focused studios into multiplayer development. According to him, this approach produced little success across PlayStation’s internal studios.
“I think there’s a belief out there that The Last of Us Online was just kind of a side project while most people [at Naughty Dog] were working on Intergalactic,” Schreier said, clarifying that the multiplayer title wasn’t a side project. “No, the opposite is true. Intergalactic did not have the majority of staff until after Last of Us Online was cancelled.”
The Last of Us Online was canceled in 2023 after Naughty Dog had reportedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the project. Schreier explained that the studio’s concern was not just whether the game could succeed, but what would happen if it did. A successful live service title would require the studio to dedicate substantial resources to maintaining it indefinitely, effectively transforming the single-player studio into a live service developer.
Schreier described this as one of the fundamental difficulties with Sony Interactive Entertainment’s strategy. PlayStation spent years building studios around single-player, narrative-driven games such as God of War, Horizon, Spider-Man and The Last of Us, before asking many of those teams to make games requiring entirely different expertise and development pipelines. “It is really hard for a studio that has kind of spent a decade building the knowhow and pipelines and chemistry to make singleplayer games” to suddenly switch to multiplayer development, he said.
Guerrilla’s Horizon live service project has now been rebooted toward a smaller cooperative experience, while projects involving Bend, Insomniac, Bluepoint were canceled or abandoned, with the latter facing studio closure.
