Four months after ending mandatory overtime for a demo on its upcoming PS5 sci-fi game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Naughty Dog is reportedly still relying on extended hours. Former senior game designer Benson Russell revealed the studio's internal acceptance of crunch in an interview with YouTuber Kiwi Talkz.
Russell, who joined after The Last of Us (2013) and left post-The Last of Us Part II, described recurring post-mortems on crunch mitigation. 'Every meeting after that was always like, “Hey, what are we gonna do to try and mitigate crunch? How are we gonna make this better?”' Leaders ultimately concluded, he said: 'We’ve just come to realize that this is what it takes to make games at our level. If you don’t want to do that, we understand, we’ll write you a great letter of recommendation.'
This echoes patterns seen in prior coverage, including a December 2025 Bloomberg report on departed anti-crunch producers and an intense crunch phase ending late that month to hit a Sony demo milestone. Crunch reportedly intensified in December when the team felt it had 'wandered too much,' treating internal deadlines as strictly as external ones. Intergalactic, Naughty Dog's first new IP in years targeting a 2027 PS5 launch, remains in development amid the studio's history of high-pressure workflows.