EDIT: An earlier version of this article claimed that Naughty Dog’s former employee, Anders Howard, was among those fired by Naughty Dog. Anders has clarified that he left the company of his own accord. GameRanx regrets this error. The article, including the title, has now been edited to reflect this correct information.
A key employee has left Naughty Dog alongside the recent round of reported layoffs.
Earlier this week, we reported on layoffs that the company had made. These were a dozen people who worked in the company’s QA department. Allegedly, Naughty Dog instructed their former employees to keep quiet about the layoffs.
It had also been reported that the reason these employees were let go was because they were part of the team that was working on The Last of Us Factions, Naughty Dog’s project long in development that hasn’t even been given an official name yet. This connects to earlier rumors that Naughty Dog has quietly put The Last of Us Factions on the backburner. While The Last of Us Factions isn’t cancelled, the have significantly scaled down the team working on it.
Today, PSU reports that Anders Howard, the studio’s principal monetization designer, has rewritten his LinkedIn CV to indicate that that job ended on September 2023. Of course, the reason Naughty Dog would need a monetization designer, is if they were working on a live service game.
The big suspicion is that that live service game is The Last of Us Factions. So this firing is another indicator that this project has been shelved or paused in some way. At the very least, it is notable that this firing is now the first one known to the public.
It’s not a fun time for Naughty Dog, who seemed to have been excited about revealing The Last of Us Factions earlier this year. As we had reported last March, Neil Druckmann promised that there would be more details to come out later in this year. That simply hasn’t come true, though to be fair, there are still a few months left for the year.
Naughty Dog will remain one of PlayStation’s most valuable internal studio, but if it’s true, the cancellation or pausing of The Last of Us Factions will be considered a real embarrassment.
Naughty Dog didn’t start out with huge critical and commercial successes. In fact, it’s pretty well known that one of their very first games ever was the 3DO’s Way Of The Warrior.
But Naughty Dog demonstrated an aptitude for making single player experiences, first with Crash Bandicoot, and then Jak and Daxter, and then Uncharted, taking us to The Last Of Us now.
All of this drama behind the scenes suggests quite ominously that there could be more going on inside Sony right now than the company lets on. Maybe we will eventually get the inside word on this situation in time.
