Ex-Naughty Dog director says colleagues still praise scrapped Last of Us Online

Some of the sharpest praise for The Last of Us Online is coming from inside the studio that buried it. Vinit Agarwal says former Naughty Dog colleagues still message him to say the scrapped multiplayer project was “the best multiplayer game” they had ever played, a brutal reminder of what Sony pulled off the board after years of work.

That praise lands harder because Agarwal said he learned the game was being canceled about 24 hours before the public announcement on December 14, 2023. By then, the project had already lived through a long development cycle that began in pre-production while Naughty Dog was making The Last of Us Part II, which shipped in 2020. Agarwal later said he spent seven years on the game and that it was about 80% complete when the plug was pulled.

Naughty Dog’s own explanation made the business case plain. The studio said the game’s scale had become too large and that shipping it would have meant years of post-launch support. It also said supporting the game would have forced Naughty Dog to become “a solely live service games studio,” a sharp turn away from the single-player identity that made the studio one of PlayStation’s most trusted names.

That tension, between internal enthusiasm and external viability, is what makes the cancellation sting. Sony had already slowed the project earlier in 2023 after Bungie reviewed it as part of a wider reassessment of live-service ambitions across PlayStation. Bloomberg reported that Bungie raised concerns about whether the game could keep players engaged over a long period of time, the exact question that now hangs over so many AAA multiplayer bets.

For Naughty Dog, the choice was not just about one game. It was about whether the studio would keep chasing the live-service market or stay with the kind of story-driven work that defined Uncharted, The Last of Us and the rest of its catalog. The company chose the latter, and that decision left a near-finished multiplayer spin-off on the cutting-room floor.

The result is a rare kind of loss in modern game development: a project that insiders describe with reverence, yet still could not survive the economics around it. For players who still remember the original Factions mode, The Last of Us Online is now a cautionary tale about how much ambition, time and talent can disappear when a live-service plan no longer looks safe enough to ship.