Naughty Dog's Last Of Us games have sold over 17M copies in 5 years

It's been five years to the day since Naughty Dog released The Last Of Us, and to mark the occasion the company took to Twitter to confirm it's now sold over 17 million copies of the game across PlayStation 3 & 4.

That's a sizable number, though not a terribly surprising one given that the game was both hailed at launch as Sony's fastest-selling "new intellectual property" in the history of the PS3, and then a year later released in remastered form on PS4.

As the studio prepares to launch its full-fledged follow-up The Last Of Us Part II, this little sales shoutout is a good reminder that porting Last Of Us to PS4 was, according to Naughty Dog, a) very hard and b) a key part of the studio's efforts to prepare its production pipeline for pumping out PS4 games.

"The Last Of Us Remastered gave us an excuse to bring those systems over, refine them and optimize them for the hardware," Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann said in 2014. "I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once it’s running well, you’re running the [versions] side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look."