Naughty Dog, the creators of Uncharted: Legacy Of Thieves Collection and The Last Of Us: Part 1, are reducing their contract developer workforce. According to a report on Kotaku, the studio is ending contracts early for at least 25 developers, most of whom have been working in quality assurance.
This news comes during a wave of layoffs in the gaming industry that has affected other companies like Team17 and Creative Assembly in the UK, as well as Epic and Mediatonic with a workforce reduction of 830 people.
According to sources from Kotaku, Naughty Dog internally announced these layoffs last week and the affected employees were pressured to keep the news confidential. All those impacted are contract workers, and it is reported that no severance was provided.
Although Naughty Dog is a subsidiary of PlayStation, Sony has been releasing several of their games on PC in recent years as part of their strategy. The most recent release was The Last Of Us Part 1 in September 2022, which experienced significant bugs upon launch. The port was handled by an external studio called Iron Galaxy, and subsequent patches addressed the issues over the following months.
In January of the same year, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection was released, featuring Uncharted 4: Drake’s Fortune and the spin-off Uncharted: The Lost Legacy without Nathan Drake. It appears that Naughty Dog is now shifting away from the Uncharted series.