Vinit Agarwal, former game director at Naughty Dog, revealed that The Last of Us Online was approximately 80% complete when it was cancelled in late 2023. He spent seven years on the project and learned of the cancellation just 24 hours before the public announcement. The decision came down to choosing between the multiplayer spinoff and Neil Druckmann's next mainline game. The cancellation is framed within Sony's broader retreat from live-service gaming — a strategy pushed hard around 2020 during COVID-19 that later collapsed as demand waned, resulting in studio closures, layoffs, and scrapped projects across PlayStation's first-party portfolio.
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