Naughty Dog Faces Layoffs Amid Challenges with The Last of Us Multiplayer Game Development

Naughty Dog, the renowned Santa Monica-based game development studio owned by Sony, is cutting jobs, albeit not internally. The news comes from a fresh Kotaku report. Citing anonymous sources, it reveals that at least 25 contract workers were cut last week, mostly in the quality assurance department (though art and production teams were also reportedly affected in some capacity). The report also says the affected employees received pressure not to disclose the news. They won’t get any severance, either. Their contracts expire at the end of this month, and they are expected to keep working until then.

This is the first time we hear of layoffs at Naughty Dog, though the full-time staff is reportedly still the same at around 400 employees. The layoffs may be related to the struggling development of the standalone The Last of Us multiplayer game. Fans had been waiting for it ever since Naughty Dog revealed its multiplayer ambitions were much bigger than the Factions mode included with the first The Last of Us, and as such, a standalone game would be produced while The Last of Us Part II was single player only.

Last year, series creator Neil Druckmann started speaking publicly about the game, and he later claimed Naughty Dog would finally unveil it in 2023. However, around four months ago, the studio said the standalone The Last of Us multiplayer game wasn’t ready to be shown. On that same day, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier revealed that the project had been scaled down after receiving a negative evaluation from Bungie on its potential to engage players over a long time. Kotaku’s report also says that one source reckons the game is ‘basically on ice’ at this point.

Naughty Dog is undergoing a Studio Leadership restructuring, too, following co-president Evan Wells’s decision to leave the company at the end of 2023 after 25 years of service.