Naughty Dog Studio Orders Employee Overtime for ‘Intergalactic’ by Jason Schreier for Bloomberg

"Employees at Sony Group Corp.’s Naughty Dog studio are working mandatory overtime to finish a demo for their next video game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet...Starting in late October, staff were asked to begin working a minimum of eight extra hours a week and logging their overtime in an internal spreadsheet...This overtime period was an attempt to get the production back on track after several missed deadlines."

Patrick Goss, a Quality Assurance Director at Naughty Dog, in the documentary Grounded II: Making The Last of Us Part II. Emphasis my own.

"Every couple of months, we send out a 90-second questionnaire that goes, 'Are you worried about your workload?' 'Are you worried about having to work overtime?' If you feel like, 'I'm overburdened with work,' you have to tell somebody."

I guess these people decided to tell Schreier.

While I do agree with what Neil Druckmann and Kurt Margenau said in the same documentary, the takeaway from this article will be, essentially, "Naughty Dog gonna Naughty Dog."

"First we had to do, 'What is crunch?' Let's define it. Because when you just look at hours, they turn out to be too simplistic." — Neil Druckman

"It's a multitude of factors, it's not just one thing. It's not just, 'Oh, because of this, this is what's causing crunch.' It's so many of these little things." — Kurt Margenau

More shocking to me is that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is still 1 1/2 to 2 years away. Naughty Dog will have not shipped a brand new game in 7+ years at that point.

"But this is the first time in recent years that overtime has been mandated across the bulk of the studio. The game is slated for release in mid-2027, according to the people familiar with the schedule, leaving some employees wondering if the overtime requirements will get worse later in the development cycle."

I came across this statement I wrote in Naughty Dog Cancels The Last of Us Online just the other day, itself being two years old.

"I wager Naughty Dog will never announce a game years in advance again."

Naughty Dog gonna Naughty Dog.