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Developers at Naughty Dog have reportedly spent the last seven weeks shackled to mandatory overtime, in a pinch to finish an internal demo of bounty hunter game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet by December.
Bloomberg explains staff members at The Last of Us studio have been urged to put in at least eight additional hours of work per week, and this has been true since October. Staff is preparing for a demo review by parent company Sony, and the Intergalacic team has apparently already missed multiple deadlines.
This sort of hardcore overtime, what's often referred to as bone-breaking "crunch" in the industry, has become increasingly unflattering for studios as more workers speak out against it – and Naughty Dog was once a notorious perpetrator. It acknowledged this in 2024, when quality assurance lead Patrick Goss said, "When we onboard people, we tell them that we have a reputation as a studio for crunching, and it's something that we don't want. And it's something we're not going to do anymore."
Studio lead Neil Druckmann agreed, saying, "We now have the goal for Naughty Dog to eliminate crunch."
Since then, Intergalactic developers have been asked to come into the office five days a week, as opposed to a previous three-day, hybrid arrangement, though there's a small caveat where they can't work more than 60 hours a week. Bloomberg says this is the first mandatory overtime period Naughty Dog has had in years, and it was ominously preceded by a commemorative gift for members of the Intergalactic production team earlier this year: metal coins displaying a quote from the game, "The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end."
Though Naughty Dog's crunch is currently subsiding, some people worry it could pick back up again as Intergalactic heads towards what they say will be a mid-2027 release.
