Almost Finished, Then Finished Off
The Last of Us Online was "almost 80 percent" complete when Naughty Dog pulled the plug in late 2023, according to former game director Vinit Argawal. He calls the cancellation "soul-crushing" and ties the project's fate to a boom-and-bust cycle triggered by COVID-19.
Speaking on the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo, Argawal said he worked on the standalone multiplayer entry for roughly seven years. That long runway aimed to expand the acclaimed Factions concept into a full PvP game set after The Last of Us Part II, but the plan couldn't survive a changing market.
Argawal traced the game's funding back to 2020, when lockdowns supercharged online play. "Online games specifically saw a huge boost because people wanted to play with their friends, they couldn't see their friends, so they had to play online with their friends," he said. "Online games got a huge boon. Sony decided to put a lot of money into online gaming, like everyone else was. That's part of why The Last of Us multiplayer got funding."
Internally, progress looked strong. The director said the build was "doing really, really well" and "almost to 80 percent completion, it was very, very close to done." That momentum stalled as the pandemic wave receded and spending tightened across entertainment and tech.
Then the market cooled as offices reopened in 2022 and 2023. "That [pandemic gaming] spending reduced, the economy also went down," Argawal explained. "And so, all that money that flooded into the game industry was not gonna be able to sustain because money's getting pulled out, they had to also collapse the spending. They overspent, basically. They were overzealous. One of the casualties of that was this game I was directing."