Naughty Dog Hit With Crunch Allegations Again as Intergalactic Release Nears
With Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet speeding toward release, Naughty Dog is back in the crunch spotlight as a Bloomberg report says developers were mandated to work overtime to finish an internal demo, reigniting outrage over the studio’s workplace practices.
New Naughty Dog game on the horizon, new crunch controversy right on cue. As the studio preps its sci-fi original 'Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet', a Bloomberg report says the team just came off a mandatory overtime push designed to hit an internal demo deadline for Sony. If you have deja vu, yeah, the Uncharted and The Last of Us eras had similar stories. The difference now: the wider industry keeps insisting it wants to be better about this stuff.
What Bloomberg says happened
- Developers were told to put in an extra eight hours of work per week to build an in-house demo for Sony to review.
- During the push, staff were working seven days a week: five days in the office (the studio switched from its usual three-day in-office setup to five) and two days from home.
- No internal protest is reported, but the math speaks for itself on burnout risk.
- Once the demo push wrapped this week, employees were allowed to go back to the previous three-days-in-office schedule through the end of January.
- Online reaction was swift: fans and industry folks called out Naughty Dog for leaning on crunch again.
Why the pressure is spiking now
'Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet' is a big swing for Naughty Dog: a brand-new IP with all the expectations that come from the studio behind PlayStation's prestige franchises. Internally, the team is aiming for a mid-2027 release window. That clock is ticking, and Bloomberg notes the studio still hasn’t turned in a playable demo to Sony yet. So the push makes sense on a business level, even if it is, you know, seven-days-a-week obvious.
This is also playing out while everyone keeps saying they want healthier work cultures. Naughty Dog has been criticized for crunch before on Uncharted and The Last of Us, and the studio has talked about evolving how it operates. Then you read about five days in-office plus two work-from-home days, and it all feels a little contradictory.
The stakes for Naughty Dog
Naughty Dog games have a reputation for polish, scope, and that one-shot set piece you talk about for a week. That bar doesn’t lower just because it’s a new IP. But if the path to hitting those internal milestones is mandatory overtime and a seven-day grind, expect the backlash to keep simmering, especially in 2025 when studios are under a microscope for how they treat teams.
Short version: the demo crunch is over for now, the schedule rolls back through the end of January, and the studio is still staring down a mid-2027 target without a demo in Sony’s hands yet. Ambition meets timeline, timeline calls in overtime. We’ve seen this movie before.