The Last of Us 2 story trailer has finally arrived, but there’s a catch — the PlayStation YouTube channel has disabled comments and disabled dislikes and likes, presumably to prevent anyone from exposing any of The Last of Us 2 spoilers.
If you haven’t been keeping up with The Last of Us 2, it’s been pretty rough sailing for Naughty Dog. First, the game was delayed to sometime in early 2020 last year. Then, the ongoing pandemic caused the game to be delayed yet again this year.
ALSO: Report: The Last of Us 2 leak was conducted by hackers
Delays can happen, but it was The Last of Us 2 spoilers being leaked that was probably the worst of all for both companies. A good chunk of gameplay and various cutscenes that reveal important story elements had popped up online, reportedly released to the internet by hackers.
Now, The Last of Us 2 story trailer has finally been revealed. Game trailers are the perfect time for a developer and publisher to build community engagement, but that’s not going to happen this time around: Sony has made the decision to disable YouTube comments and turn off likes and dislikes.
The official PlayStation YouTube channel hasn’t taken this measure with any of its other videos — all previously uploaded content allowed users to comment, like, and dislike as usual. However, considering that the internet is currently awash with individuals looking to spoil the game for others, it’s unsurprising that PlayStation has looked to prevent that from happening in its own YouTube channel.
The ratio of likes to dislikes is certainly something that the developer and publisher would keep an eye on, given the vitriolic reaction to the spoilers thus far. For instance, Neil Druckmann’s innocuous announcement that the game had gone gold received 68,000 dislikes compared to 23,000 likes, with TLoU2 courting controversy before it’s even been released. As such, a comment section filled with spoilers and a potentially large amount of dislikes over likes is perhaps just too great a risk to take for a game that is already in a perilous launch situation.
