Last year’s capstone announcement at The Game Awards was for a brand-new IP and game from none other than Naughty Dog–a studio with remarkable track record of putting out industry-defining titles, with The Last of Us and Uncharted both having entries in Metacritic’s top 100 games list, and the rest of the series not trailing far behind. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is the latest big project the studio has been working on infusing with the same triple-A excellence as their previous work, and as of now is slated to release some time in 2027. Although to achieve that timeline and quality, the studio has had to go all hands on deck. Bloomberg recently alleged in an article by Jason Schreier that the employees at Naughty Dog have been mandated to work overtime, apparently in anticipation of a demo they need to show the big-wigs at Sony. The article’s sources, who wish to not be named, allege that the increase in workload has already affected some of the developers’ personal lives; causing strain on their care-taking roles and families. Since the start of October, Naughty Dog’s staff have had to come in five days a week instead of three, although they’ve been advised by the studio to keep their weekly hours under 60. Schreier clarifies however that the studio is resuming its normal labor requirements starting around January next year.
It should be noted that reportedly this won’t by any means be the first time the studio has had its developers brace for the infamous crunch–an unfortunately common workplace hazard in the games industry now–and has done so for many of its recent releases. According to Schreier, who interviewed about dozen devs at Naughty Dog back in 2020, the crunch culture there was especially harrowing, quoting one developer as claiming that the studio’s expectations are at “any cost” to their employees. A year later, Game Informer asked studio lead Neil Druckmann what his opinion was on Naughty Dog’s work reputation, and he asserted asserted his concern with the issue, concluding that: “…we think of it as, how do we look out for the well-being of our colleagues and everyone that works at Naughty Dog… We find that there is no one solution that fits everybody. Everybody has a unique situation we might need to address.”
The tech sector, which gaming has come to be a dominant part of, has not generally had the best reputation in terms of work culture, and with the recent adoption of the “9-9-6” schedule (12 hour shifts six days a week) by an increasing amount of startups in the industry, the office space for the digital worker isn’t getting any less oppressive. And from Schreier’s reporting, it seems like this culture this phenomenon comes from continues to leak into creative studios like Naughty Dog.