by
William D’Angelo
, posted on 02 April 2026 / 2,986 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.
