"Do you want a new game or not?": Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet skipping State of Play is fine, former The Last of Us dev says, because making a trailer costs 4 months of work

You may have noticed a certain tentpole studio from Sony was missing from this year's State of Play showcase preceding Summer Game Fest. Despite the ongoing development of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and rumors of more, Naughty Dog had no part in the offerings, and a former contributor to the studio was quick to explain why.

Retweeting a post speculating on the team's general absence, Del Walker, an artist who worked on The Last of Us: Part 2 Remastered, made the reasons clear. "Every time a [triple-A] game studio has to move resources over to making a trailer, it causes the game to lose about 4 months of actual dedicated development iteration time," he writes.

"Look, do you want a new game or not?" Walker finishes, laying out the paradigm. It seems we either get footage and a material update on what's going on with Intergalactic - or anything else the devs might be working on - or we let them work and get a finished game sooner.

The general cost of contributing to these events tends to re-emerge around Summer Game Fest, Gamescom and The Game Awards, as hopes and expectations are kept in line with the reality of putting together a teaser. As Walker says, it's labour, and usually quite intensive labour at that, since everything needs to be approved from the top down and cleared for public viewing.

I'm sure there are things Naughty Dog and Neil Druckmann would like to discuss and show off, but it probably just wasn't worth the effort at this point in time. Ideally, since Intergalactic's been revealed, you want something truly headline-grabbing, like a release date, and the space-based sci-fi adventure likely isn't there quite yet.

This is compounded by the growing belief The Last of Us 3 may be in the works. When and how that might be revealed just fans the flames of anticipation, followed by disappointment afterward at the silence. Either way, patience is a virtue - we'll hear more when the time is right.

Years before The Last of Us put up 20m sales and spawned a successful TV adaptation, a Sony exec and several Naughty Dog devs thought "It's not going to do very well" because it was too different from Uncharted 3