Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has killed off any chance of a 2012 launch for The Last of Us, telling VG247 it won’t launch this year.

Yoshida confirmed the news when talking about the company’s line-up for next year, confirming the near-future focus was providing growth and investing respectively in PlayStation Vita.

“We are not ready to talk about 2013. But some of the games we showed like God of War and The Last of Us are not coming out this year,” he said in an E3 interview due to go live shortly.

“We will talk more about what our line-up of games will be like in 2013. PS Vita we just launched. It’s been just four months.

“It’s its second year next year; it’s a really crucial year for us so we will continue to invest in making games from our first party studio standpoint, and at the same time, we would like to see more publishers do games like Assassin’s Creed III Liberation; that is fantastic.”

This is the first time a release date for the game has been narrowed by either Sony or Naughty Dog down since its announce at the VGAs last December. An early 2012 or early 2013 release had been previously on the cards for the new IP from the Uncharted developer.

Watch the stunning E3 demo of TLOU here. The full Yoshida interview goes live soon.