Little has been revealed aboutNaughty Dog’s upcomingThe Last of Usmultiplayer game ever since it was known to be in development, but a recent job listing on the company’s officialLinkedInpage does tell us something; itcouldbe free-to-play. The listing for the position of Producer - Live Ops was posted five days ago, and it states to be looking for someone to assist the studio with its new multiplayer title.
It has the expected responsibilities and requirements of overseeing content roadmaps and managing communication pipelines between teams, but towards the end, in the Bonus Skills section, it specifically asks for someone with proven experience producing “a AAA, free to play, live title.” This is far from any sort of reliable confirmation, of course, but it is noteworthy that the job posting specifically mentions free-to-play when listing the desired experiences for the position at hand.
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The job description seems to accurately relay all the general responsibilities of managing a live service title, except for monetization. It’s unclear why Naughty Dog would prefer someone with free-to-play development experience unless the studio plans to implement some aspects common in free-to-play service games. It is certainly a possibility that the studio wants to implementsomeparts of a free-to-play monetization model to support the game long-term, while still charging a premium upfront.
The gaming audience first found out about this Last of Us multiplayer project back in 2019, when Naughty Dogrevealedthat it had been working on “the evolution of Factions mode from The Last of Us Part 1” for the then-upcomingThe Last of Us Part 2. However, the team had to cut the mode out because their ambition grew too large. The studio stated, “you will eventually experience the fruits of our team’s online ambition.”
Later, in Gamescom 2022, Naughty Dog Co-President Neil Druckmannre-confirmedthat the project was in development, showed off some concept art, and promised we would see more of it in 2023. He stated that despite being multiplayer, the game has a story, that it will introduce new characters, and he claimed that the game is big, specifically “as big as any of [Naughty Dog’s] single-player games.” Clearly, the project is quite an ambitious one, and ambition is usually expensive, so we’ll have to wait and see if Naughty Dog and Sony take the risk of making it free-to-play.
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