The Last of Us Multiplayer Game was Roughly 80% Complete, According to Former Director - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 April 2026 / 2,459 Views
The former director of The Last of Us multiplayer game Vinit Agarwal in an interview in Lance E. Lee's LelPodcast (via Eurogamer) claims the game was roughly 80 percent complete when it PlayStation cancelled it.
In the interview he says the multiplayer game was "doing really really well internally" and it was "developed it to 80 percent completion."
He added, "all the forces that pushed the games industry in 2020 were the reasons it started declining in 2022 - 2023." As people returned to the office the amount of spending decreased and "all the money that went into the industry, was not able to sustain. Because money was being pulled out, they had to also collapse the spending. It collapsed, basically. Overzealous."
"A decision had to be made. Make this game, or make this next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company. So, kind of naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to pick the game which was the soul bread-and-butter of the studio, rather than this experimental game I was working on. I believe it was going to be really big, but unfortunately couldn't see the light of day."
Agarwal said it was a "devestating moment" when The Last of Us multiplayer game was cancelled.
"It was soul crushing," he said. "To find out it was getting cancelled 24 hours before [the cancellation] was announced to the public, that's how I found out the game was being cancelled. It was just unfortunate and they had to do that because they have to control the messaging."
The Last of Us multiplayer game was cancelled in December 2023.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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neil has taken a very successful studio to a point where it can't make games for a generation. I would love to see the day Naughty Dog gets rid of neil.
Also, the only reason TloU 1 sold so high is because people combine the original PS3 version with the PS4 remaster which was bundled in with the PS4 for years.
That's a very fair point. I actually got the first game in a ps4 bundle. Although I would've got the game eventually regardless of the bundle.
Still salty we didn't get this.
Remember... If you cant monetize a game indefinitely, you may as well cancel it
FYI they cancelled the recycled IP microtransaction-friendly multiplayer game in favor of the brand-new IP single player adventure game Intergalactic.
Could have handed it to Bungie to run alongside Marathon instead of scrapping it.
Bungie was the one criticizing it tho, so they shouldn't want it. Naughty Dog wouldn't want the biggest IP handed by another studio either.
Well, they would kinda love it now that Marathon is flopping...
Marathon and Destiny 2 together aren't doing even remotely good numbers. Destiny 2 is basically over. They'll keep working on Marathon to try to save it.
So yes, that same Bungie. Could always get a team of like 20 devs from ND to go help them with it and to also get in what ND thinks is appropriate to the franchise or not.
Wasting 7 years of work with it over 80% done is ridiculous.
You make it sound like it was 7 years on a single project, when most of that was with the game being TloU2's MP mode.
They stopped it when they realised the massive investment needed post-release and howbthat would affect the development of other games.
Cancelling it did you and many others a favour, otherwise a successful release or the game would've meant no Intergalactic, no Uncharted (as speculated)... Nothing except Factions for many many years.
I was never going to play it, but still felt like they could have finished it, and had another company work on supporting it after it's release. Blue Point wasn't doing anything at that point.
this is part of the ps5 cost increase? wonder the loss here?
this is about events 3 years ago...
cool, wonder what the losses are or were?
I will never forgive them for not including Factions in TLOU Part II
i mean '80%' might be accurate but development stories for this game were rough. it sounded like it just wasnt going well. so either you as sony push out a mediocre game and it launches with an okay player count, and bleeds its userbase immediately, and MAYBE you pump enough updates into it for people to come back, or you axe it and put your resources into the kind of game you know the studio can make successfully.
80% complete they say, fml... WHY NEIL!!
Insane that we are six years into the gen and there hasn’t been a new Naughty Dog game. Sony really is lucky Microsoft has been high on fentanyl for awhile.
They could have given this to any number of studios to finish. Just another baffling decision by Sony.
Still baffles me that all these tech bro executives didn't realise that the COVID boom wasn't going to last.
I'm guessing they thought the change wouldn't be this drastic, that they thought they could retain more of the players. Surely they must've realized the risk of the situation reverting after the pandemic is over.
Given the obscene level of expansion and investment then the massive layoffs that happened after, I doubt they even thought it would go backwards at all.
I was curious about this game exclusively because I find TLOU world and lore at the same time interesting and underdeveloped in the main series. Would play it only to know more about the factions and politics. Sad it was cancelled so close to completion
