Naughty Dog made a bold move by making Uncharted 3’s multiplayer component to free-to-play yesterday.

Speaking with PSBlog, Game Director Justin Richmond said, “The Free-To-Play model takes away a huge barrier that exists for many players. With this model, people can check out the game without having to pay a dime, and in fact play it in perpetuity without ever paying a cent. This just isn’t something we can support in the traditional releases.”

Richmond promised few surprises for existing players, “As a thank you for supporting the game, we will also be giving out a few surprises for players that have been playing the full retail disc before the Free-To-Play version was released.

The only real transition is that we will be resetting the leaderboards in the interest of starting fresh with the new player base,” he said.

He added, “Uncharted 3 has had great success compared to Uncharted 2, and we hope that the Free-To-Play version will keep that going. We aren’t just sending this version out to die, either. We have long term plans in terms of content releases and support as we move forward.”

When asked about ND’s upcoming survival horror action-adventure ‘The Last of Us’ featuring a Free-to-Play multiplayer mode, he said, “I can’t really comment on The Last of Us right now, as we are still actively working on it. But I will say that if this endeavor goes well, it is something we will certainly be looking at for future products.”

Naughty Dog‘s The Last of Us is set to launch worldwide on June 14, 2013 for PS3.

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