Of course, they were not parallel but they were in development at the same time. That's how The Last of Us Part II leak first surfaced when Nolan North said it was in development while he was working on Uncharted 4.
Renowned voice actor Nolan North, perhaps unintentionally, reveals that Naughty Dog is working on The Last of Us 2, and that he will not be returning for the sequel.
gamerant.com
If one is in pre-production and the other is not, then both games are still in development. This just proves our point; they can develop multiple projects at the same time.
According to the ND presidents, U3 and TLOU were under production at the same time. They had a hard time, and decided to have a single big game under full production at the same time following them.
So after them they focused on Uncharted 4 and after it TLOU2, while smaller teams worked on Left Behind and Lost Legacy. They later had one or two small teams overviewing / supporting mostly outsourced remasters, remakes and pc ports while most of the studio was focused on something else.
As usual in videogames development, when the main part of the team (mostly programmers and testers) are completing the final development part of the game, other very small part of the team work on the preproduction of the next game of the project (producers, designers, concept artists, etc). With the idea of that when the most of the people complete their job on the production of a game can jump to the production of the next one, without having to wait to complete preproduction sitting on desk without doing anything.
During TLOU2 they had their SP and MP teams. Around 2019 they announced that MP wouldn't be included in TLOU2 and instead would become a standalone TLOU game to be released after TLOU2.
It's fair to assume that part of the TLOU2 (SP) team once completed TLOU2 didn't move to TLOU Online, but instead moved to start another SP game. We know isn't TLOU3, because Druckmann said he wrote a first draft of the script to have it ready if some day in the future they developed it, but that then (after TLOU2) they weren't working on it.
So if they started one of their current SP games just after TLOU2, it should be a new IP or an Uncharted game (ND presidents said they were interested on making new IP and continuing with Uncharted and TLOU). But when they announced the TLOU Online delay they said to have multiple new games more under development at the same time in addition to TLOU Online, being at least one of them (we know now that at least two) being SP.
ND, like all SIE teams kept growing these years. We don't know exactly at which point they started these two new SP games but maximum one of them should be soon after they shipped TLOU2, that would mean around >3 years of development. It's fair to assume that instead of growing from 1 to 3 teams directly they first grew to 2 and some time later to 3.
Meaning, pretty likely this 2nd SP game pretty likely entered production relatively recently somewhere before they announced the TLOU Online delay.
Decided to do it as a part of a company wide strategy of going all in into GaaS.
No, ND decided to do it because they already had delayed TLOU2 multiple times and had to decide between to delay it more cutting their scope, to remove the MP mode or to branch it out rebooting it as a MP only game where they could go beyond their initial scope.
ND did choose the 3rd option. And nowadays AAA MP only game means GaaS.
Even investing in these GaaS studios probably came at the expense of investing in more traditional studios and games. We'll see in the next few years how their GaaS strategy will playout, so far not looking good at all as they can't even release the games.
No, because they kept investing on non-GaaS more than before. And they did show in their long plans (covered until 2026) that they continue growing their investment in non-GaaS games.
On top of that, most of the known 1st + 2nd party SIE games than have been greenlighted/started development during the Jimbo + Hermen era aren't GaaS.
Their strategy was to have more than 25 PS Studios under development (now + at least 3 Bungie games) being a dozen of them GaaS of different IPs. Out of that dozen, one has been cancelled, so 11 left. They published until now MLB, GT and Firewall (not sure if they count Destiny here) and very soon will be Helldivers too. So there are 7 left (6 if counting Destiny).
They would be:
- Concord
- Fairgame$
- Marathon
- Deviation's game
- London Studios' new IP ('the game the studio always wanted to do')
- Horizon Online
If Marathon and the other WIP new Bungie IPs aren't counted, then probably the other one is the Firesprite MP game with car combat (rumored to be Twisted Metal).
Some of these games will be published before April 2026 (I'd bet Concord, Fairgame$, Marathon), other ones later (I'd bet it's the case of Deviation's game, maybe London's game, too).
I have no idea about the Horizon Online game. Its leaked artstyle looks like crap, it's rumored to be a MMORPG codeveloped by NC Soft (Sony recently signed a deal with them, so would make sense), and its director went back to Guerrilla in early 2018. So I assume it's the next one to be announced, but let's hope they change its artstyle to make it more similar to the Horizon one.
