Vinit Agarwal spent seven years developing The Last of Us Online at Naughty Dog, shepherding the multiplayer project from 2016 until its abrupt cancellation in December 2023. He found out it was being killed just a day before Sony announced the decision publicly.
In a recent interview, Agarwal described the moment as "devastating" and "soul crushing." The game had reached approximately 80% completion when the studio made the call to shut it down, prioritizing instead its new single-player franchise Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
"I was the director of the game, and to find out that it was getting cancelled 24 hours before it was announced to the public — that's how I found out about the game getting cancelled," Agarwal said on the Lance E. Lee Podcast. "They had to do that because they had to control the messaging."
The cancellation resulted from larger industry and financial forces. During the pandemic, gaming saw unprecedented growth as people stuck at home sought entertainment and connection. Sony, like other companies, poured resources into live-service games to capitalize on this moment. The Last of Us Online benefited from that confidence, and internally, the project was progressing well.
But the factors that fueled gaming's COVID boom reversed just as quickly. As people returned to offices and spending patterns normalized, the industry contracted. The economy weakened. Money that had flooded into studios dried up.
"All that money that flooded into the game industry was not going to be able to sustain," Agarwal explained. "They overspent basically. They were overzealous."
Naughty Dog faced a hard choice: continue investing years of resources into live-service support for The Last of Us Online, or redirect those resources toward what would become Intergalactic. Neil Druckmann, the studio's president and director of Intergalactic, won out.
"Make this game or make the next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company," Agarwal said. "You can understand what happened there."
A Game Born From Trauma
What made the cancellation especially painful for Agarwal was the personal investment embedded in the project's design. The game's core concept stemmed from a armed robbery he experienced in Austin, Texas, in 2012.
Agarwal was visiting a friend late one night when two men appeared behind him and his companion with shotguns. The encounter was terrifying—the gunmen demanded they empty their pockets. Agarwal ran, was tripped by a shotgun, and dropped everything before fleeing with his friend. The robbers ultimately made off with a wallet containing about $30, which they used once at McDonald's before abandoning the stolen credit card.
That experience of sudden vulnerability, the desperation driving the criminals, and the disconnect between the violence and the meager reward stayed with him. A second mugging in Brooklyn reinforced the impression.
"What did they really get out of that whole engagement? Maybe like a McDonald's meal," Agarwal reflected. "Yet they did it because they were desperate, I presume."
He channeled this into The Last of Us Online, a multiplayer game set in the series' post-apocalyptic world where players hunt each other for survival supplies. The game aimed to recreate that feeling of being hunted—the fear, the desperation, the dehumanizing logic of scarcity.
"I wanted people to get that feeling," he said. "That sense of desperation that comes out of that, and what you're willing to do when you're desperate, and the dehumanizing element of it where you're gonna almost hunt someone like an animal for the scraps."
He remembered playing an early version and hiding behind a table as another player searched for him. When he reloaded his weapon, the sound gave him away. The resulting chase through corridors, hiding in overgrown grass while his pursuer searched nearby, felt authentically harrowing to him.
"It felt so authentically like that moment," Agarwal said. "It was therapy for me."
The loss of the project hit differently because of how personal it had become. "It killed me that people couldn't play it," he said. He subsequently left Naughty Dog to start his own game development studio in Japan.
Naughty Dog's decision gained clarity later when former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida revealed that feedback from Bungie—the live-service specialist Sony had acquired—helped convince the studio that maintaining The Last of Us Online would be incompatible with developing Intergalactic. Bungie apparently outlined the relentless resource demands of live-service games, prompting Naughty Dog's realization that the two projects couldn't coexist.
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