Naughty Dog Barely Touched Intergalactic Until The Last of Us Online Was Cancelled

Intergalactic Wasn’t All Hands On Deck Until Few Years Ago

There’s a widely held belief that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet has quietly been Naughty Dog’s main priority for years, with The Last of Us Online treated as more of a side project running alongside it.

According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, that’s backwards. “I think there’s a belief out there that The Last of Us Online was just kind of a side project while most people were working on Intergalactic,” Schreier said in a new video.

“No, the opposite is true. Intergalactic did not have the majority of staff until after The Last of Us Online was cancelled. And then most people in the studio came over to work on Intergalactic. Many people in the studio, I would say the majority of the studio, was working on either The Last of Us Online or the remakes that they were doing throughout the 2020s.”

That reframes Intergalactic’s timeline in a meaningful way. The game was revealed at The Game Awards 2024, but full studio-wide attention on it really only began once The Last of Us Online was cancelled in December 2023, later than the “Naughty Dog has been quietly building this for years” framing usually suggests.

Why The Multiplayer Game Got Cut

The Last of Us Online had been in some form of development for around seven years and was reportedly about 80% complete when Naughty Dog pulled the plug. Former game director Vinit Agarwal has said the decision was partly a casualty of the post-COVID online gaming boom cooling off faster than publishers expected, leaving Sony less confident in a genre it had bet heavily on.

Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida has separately said he played the game before cancellation and thought it “was great,” but that feedback from Destiny developer Bungie on what live-service development actually demands made clear Naughty Dog couldn’t sustain both projects at once. Naughty Dog itself framed the call similarly at the time, saying it didn’t want to become a studio solely focused on live-service output.

Whatever the exact mix of reasons, the practical result is what Schreier is describing now: the studio didn’t split its attention evenly between two projects for years. It committed almost entirely to one, then pivoted hard to the other once the first was axed.

What This Means For Intergalactic’s Timeline

This context adds real weight to why Intergalactic still doesn’t have a release date nearly two years after its reveal, and why some, including former Naughty Dog designer Benson Russell, have openly questioned whether the studio’s release cadence is sustainable heading into the back half of this console generation.

If the bulk of the studio only turned its attention to Intergalactic sometime after late 2023, the project has had meaningfully less development runway than most assumed, even though it entered early production back in 2020. Creative director Neil Druckmann has said the game is in a playable state internally and called it “incredible,” but with reports still pointing to a 2027 window, Naughty Dog’s timeline looks a lot less like years of dedicated focus and a lot more like a studio that spent most of that time somewhere else entirely.