Naughty Dog dev who joined to help build The Last of Us multiplayer leaves after less than a year

The Last of Us multiplayer concept art — (Image credit: Sony)

A developer brought in to work on the upcoming The Last of Us multiplayer game has left Naughty Dog after less than a year.

Following the news that the The Last of Us multiplayer game is reportedly "on ice" amid layoffs at Naughty Dog, one of its key developers has now left the project. As spotted by Naughty Dog Info on Twitter, Anders Howard, who worked as a Principal Monetization Designer at the PlayStation studio, has updated their LinkedIn profile adding that their time at Naughty Dog ended in September 2023, just 11 months after starting with the company.

To be fair, this is almost an entire year after they started with Naughty Dog back in November 2022, so Howard may have just finished their work at the studio and simply moved on. However, with what we've heard about the development difficulties that The Last of Us multiplayer has faced, it seems unlikely that any work on the game - let alone work as existential as monetization - would have wrapped up in less than a year.

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Anders Howard, a Principal Monetization Designer who joined Naughty Dog just under a year ago to work on the TLOU Multiplayer project has left the studio. Howard previously worked at Epic Games. He helped design the core of Fortnite's battle pass and progression systems. pic.twitter.com/R9DdyNxBcBOctober 4, 2023

Prior to Naughty Dog, Howard worked at Ubisoft and Epic - working on Fortnite's battle pass system. This developer's prior work history makes a lot of sense since it was suspected that The Last of Us multiplayer game might be free to play last year. Other reports have revealed that the game is supposedly "very, very live service-y" although since the game was delayed earlier this year, there's a chance some of this info has changed during development.

Although not confirmation of anything specific, a look at Howard's Twitter account reveals that the developer is dealing with "funemployment" as of September 27, which lines up with the dates listed on LinkedIn.

While we wait to hear more about the project, take a look at our games like The Last of Us list.

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.