PlayStation needs Neil Druckmann more than HBO does

I really wanted to love season two of HBO’s The Last of Us. For the most part, I did — but it was also impossible to ignore the online masses saying that showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann had lost the thread in season two. Some of that comes from creative choices the pair made in adapting the first half of the PlayStation game The Last of Us Part II to TV; it’s a story with a sprawling plot that asks a lot of the player and, as it turns out, even more of a passive audience. The season two cliffhanger ending and tease of what’s to come in season three just didn’t land for a lot of people, and (spoiler alert) there are a lot of questions from viewers as to whether the show can survive the loss of Pedro Pascal’s Joel. It feels like fans of the games are mad at the changes the TV show has made, while people who haven’t played the game aren’t vibing with the story as presented in season two.

As such, I haven’t put up a full-throated defense of season two when, say, a colleague tells me it’s a bummer that the show is now “mid.” Even though there are plenty of toxic “fans” who trash the cast and seem to hate the show telling stories with gay characters, I can admit there are also legitimate issues with season two. But despite that admission making its way into my Last of Us-loving heart, I was still shocked at the news that Druckmann, co-creator of both the game and the show, was leaving the project for season three. Shortly after Druckmann’s announcement, Co-writer on The Last of Us Part II and season two of the show Halley Gross also said she was leaving, which means that the two most prominent people who worked on the games are now gone.

How this will affect season three obviously will be the big question over the work leading up to season three, which will probably arrive sometime in early 2027. The simultaneous departure of both Druckmann and Gross reeks of HBO deciding that the tepid reception to season two meant a change was needed. In a statement that lacked all of the passion Druckmann has shown for the show thus far, he said he was transitioning his “complete focus” to Naughty Dog and future games, including Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

We’ll probably never know if Druckmann left on his own or was forced out, but the part of me that loves Naughty Dog’s games is finding solace in that new focus even as HBO’s The Last of Us is thrown into turmoil. Druckmann will probably be far more useful to Sony as a whole working on new games than dabbling in the TV industry.

That’s in large part because yesterday also reminded us just how chaotic the game industry is. In the biggest news of the day, a series of wide-ranging layoffs at Microsoft impacted numerous Xbox studios, the latest bad news for an industry that has frankly been devastated by instability in recent years.

With that background in mind, Druckmann’s renewed focus on Naughty Dog makes a lot of sense. The TV industry is not hurting in the least for prestige content. Showrunner Craig Mazin already has the plot points he needs to cover in season three of The Last of Us, so Druckmann’s input will probably be missed less than it would have been when the project got started back in 2021. But PlayStation, on the other hand, needs a boost, and having a creative leader like Druckmann helping to make Intergalactic and whatever else Naughty Dog has up its sleeve is something the company could really use.

It’s no secret that the first-party PlayStation studios continue to make exceptional games — but the pace during the PS5 generation has slowed significantly. For the first few years of the PS5’s life, most big exclusives like God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West came to both the PS4 and PS5. That slowly changed, with titles like Astro Bot and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 being built exclusively for the PS5. But the cadence of these releases has slowed significantly; this year's releases include Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (likely a timed exclusive) and Ghost of Yotei but five years into this generation it's undoubtedly been a slow burn.

That trend is particularly acute for Naughty Dog. After releasing Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End in 2016 and following that quickly with the standalone expansion Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in 2017, Naughty Dog has released one (1) original game since: The Last of Us Part II. Other than that, we’ve gotten… remakes and remasters of both franchises, perhaps not coincidentally to draw in people who found The Last of Us via the HBO show.

Between his duties as Naughty Dog’s studio head and his TV work, it’s fair to wonder how much time Druckmann has spent on actual games in recent years. It's also entirely possible he's spread too thin now, even without co-running the TV show — it's probably past time for some new creative visionaries to take the lead at Naughty Dog given Druckmann's role as chief executive.

If he’s truly the main director and writer for Intergalactic as he said in his statement, it’s good news for the PlayStation brand that he’s back on that gig full-time. It’s just a bit over six months since Intergalactic was first announced, so we have no real idea where the game is in its development cycle. But it sounds like the game has been in development since 2020, and Naughty Dog has said it learned a lesson from announcing The Last of Us Part II so long before it actually launched. Hopefully we’re looking at a 2026 or 2027 release rather than much beyond that.

Meanwhile, Druckmann’s departure from HBO’s The Last of Us might be a bit of a canary in the coal mine for Sony’s broader PlayStation ambitions and a refocus on just making games. Games industry expert Joost Van Dreunen wrote in 2023 that the success of the show’s first season was “the culmination of Sony’s gradual transition to becoming a media company.” That’s something the company itself has talked up in the years since — the idea of becoming platform-less, with franchises existing on the PlayStation, on the movie screen and on the smaller TV screen in your home. Take its CES 2025 presentation, for example; Sony talked up multiple gaming adaptations besides The Last of Us like the Horizon franchise and Ghost of Tsushima.

"While [Sony] continues to sell hardware at scale, its strategic emphasis is shifting toward high-margin digital services and franchise expansion," Van Dreunen wrote last month. "Titles like The Last of Us have crossed into television with critical success, and Sony has invested heavily in anime distribution (via Crunchyroll) and film adaptations of its game IP. It positions PlayStation less as a closed hardware ecosystem and more as the foundation for a vertically integrated content engine. Rather than chasing distribution breadth like Microsoft, Sony is doubling down on cultural depth, using its exclusive IP to build multi-format engagement loops."

I don’t think a less-than-stellar second season of The Last of Us will cause Sony to abandon this strategy. (Sony is also too big of a ship to completely turn away from this plan very quickly.) But the repositioning of Druckmann as the lead of a successful and influential video game studio rather than a multi-medium creative visionary reinforces the fact that if they’re going to have hits on a variety of different platforms, new, ambitious and hopefully good games like Intergalactic are a necessity. At this point, HBO’s The Last of Us is going to keep on rolling, with or without Druckmann — there were a lot of loud complaints, but also still plenty of viewers and positive reviews. But Naughty Dog is past due for another big game that pushes the genre in a new direction. It’s the right time for Druckmann to come home.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/playstation-needs-neil-druckmann-more-than-hbo-does-154951145.html?src=rss https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/playstation-needs-neil-druckmann-more-than-hbo-does-154951145.html?src=rss