Another job listing says Sony’s new studio is working with Naughty Dog on ‘a beloved franchise’

Sony’s new internal development team is co-developing a game with Naughty Dog based on “a beloved franchise”, a job listing suggests.

Earlier this week a role advertised on a job recruitment site stated that Sony was “building a new internal game development team in partnership with PSS Visual Arts”, the San Diego-based support studio which recently contributed to The Last of Us Part 1.

The job listing later stated that the unannounced project was being developed in collaboration with Uncharted and The Last of Us studio Naughty Dog.

These sections of the job listing were latter removed and replaced with: “Sony PlayStation is building a new internal game development team. This is the same world-class team known for its contributions to the Last of Us franchise!”

Now, another job listing has been published, based in the same San Diego area as Visual Arts. Although it doesn’t make specific reference to the studio, it states that the role is for “a new PlayStation studio based in San Diego, CA.”

It goes on to state that, “currently we are co-developing an exciting new project with Naughty Dog in a beloved franchise.”

PlayStation’s Visual Arts Service Group was established with the goal of growing some of PlayStation’s biggest franchises. For many years it worked as a support studio on series like Spider-Man and Uncharted, but according to reports, recently held ambitions to lead its own projects.

According to a Bloomberg report from last year, Visual Arts wanted to remake the first Uncharted game, but the project was apparently deemed to be too expensive and time-consuming, so it switched its attention to this year’s remake of The Last of Us, a  release deemed as requiring less additional design work.

The same publication claimed that at one point another Sony studio, Days Gone developer Bend, was at one point assigned to work on a new Uncharted game with supervision from Naughty Dog.

There are more recent signs that Sony could be planning to revisit the Uncharted franchise. Earlier this year a newly appointed recruiter at Naughty Dog claimed she had been hired to build “future teams for not only new titles but for the legacy of Uncharted”.

All of the core Uncharted games have been remastered. Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection (2015), which included remasters of the first three games, was developed by Sony-owned Bluepoint Games.

Naughty Dog, which developed all Uncharted’s mainline series entries to date, recently discussed its in-development The Last of Us multiplayer project, and claimed that it will be as big as any of its single-player games.