After years of being accepted as just how things are done, crunch—working horrifically long hours for weeks or months at a stretch in order to meet an arbitrary deadline set by an executive who's probably still going home on time every night—is now widely frowned upon in the videogame industry. But it also seems to be awfully hard to do away with: A new Bloomberg report says Naughty Dog has been pushing employees to work at least eight extra hours per week since late October in order to finish an internal demo of its upcoming sci-fi game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Intergalactic was revealed at The Game Awards 2024 with a long cinematic that landed (for me, at least) as kind of a mashup of Uncharted with Ready Player One, in space: Porsche-branded ship, Sony audio player, anime on the TV, and Pet Shop Boys on CD. Studio boss Neil Druckmann later said the game, despite its clear action trappings, is "about faith and religion," which is an interesting pitch, but we really haven't heard anything about it since.
It sounds like things have not been going especially smoothly behind the scenes: The Bloomberg report says Naughty Dog has missed multiple internal deadlines on Intergalactic, and this push is an attempt to get the game back on schedule. Employees were reportedly told not to work more than 60 hours per week, and were also ordered to return to the office for five days a week, rather than the three days per week that was previously permitted.
The report says the mandated overtime and office days actually ended this week for "most staff" as the internal demo is being finalized, but with the full game expected to be out sometime in 2027 some employees are reportedly worried that mandated crunch will get even worse down the road.
This is far from Naughty Dog's first brush with crunch. An in-depth Kotaku report in 2020 alleged that the practice was common at the studio and brutal even by the standards of the game industry: One developer on The Last of Us 2 said at the time that the studio is "an amazing creative environment. But you can't go home." Quality assurance lead Patrick Goss acknowledged in early 2024 that Naughty Dog has "a reputation as a studio for crunching," but added that "it's something we're not going to do anymore." But as we learned from CD Projekt's work on Cyberpunk 2077, no crunch is an easy commitment to make, and much harder to put into practice.
