Naughty Dog Is Back To Mandating Crunch, And They Gave Employees A ‘Suffering’ Coin To Prove It
It turns out that "doing better" was just a phase, because Naughty Dog is back to squeezing its developers like juice oranges.
If you believed the PR spin after the release of The Last of Us Part II, you know, the part where the studio swore they were moving away from the toxic burnout culture that defined their previous hits, I have some oceanfront property in Arizona to sell you. According to a new report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, the Santa Monica studio has spent the last seven weeks forcing employees into mandatory overtime.
And the reason? Not to ship a game. Not to fix a game-breaking bug. No, they are burning the candle at both ends just to polish a demo for their corporate overlords at Sony.
The "Divine End" of Your Free Time
Let’s look at the specifics, because they paint a grim picture of project management gone wrong. For the last nearly two months, staff working on the upcoming sci-fi IP Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet were ordered to work a minimum of eight extra hours a week. They had to log this overtime in a spreadsheet, like children tracking their chores, with a "generous" cap of 60 hours a week.
On top of that, the hybrid work model was tossed out the window. Staff were dragged back into the office five days a week, leaving parents and pet owners scrambling to find care.
What frustrates me isn't just the overtime; it's the context. This crunch was triggered by missed deadlines. It was an attempt to get production "back on track" for an internal review. When management fails to schedule correctly, the developers are the ones who pay the tax with their evenings and weekends.
The Most Tone-Deaf Coin in History
You cannot write satire this good. I swear, if I put this in a script, you would tell me it was too on-the-nose.
Earlier this year, members of the production team were given customized metal coins. On one side, the Naughty Dog paw. On the other? A quote from the Intergalactic trailer:
"The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end."
Read that again. Management handed out a token glorifying "suffering" to the people they are actively overworking. It is genuinely almost impressive how villainous that is. It reads less like a team-building gift and more like a prop from a dystopia. Imagine missing your kid’s recital because you had to fix a lighting shader, and your boss flips you a coin that says, essentially, "Your pain is required for my bonus."
The 2027 Problem
Here is the kicker: Intergalactic isn't slated for release until mid-2027.
We are in late 2025. If Naughty Dog is already hitting the panic button and mandating crunch just to get a vertical slice ready for Sony, what on earth is 2026 going to look like? Crunch usually happens at the end of a project, the "final push." If you are sprinting this hard at the start of the marathon, you are going to die before you see the finish line.
We were told Naughty Dog built a new team of producers specifically to avoid this. Well, according to the report, many of those producers have already quit. That should tell you everything you need to know about the current morale inside the kennel.
A Masterpiece Built on Misery?
The sad reality is that Intergalactic will probably be incredible. It will likely get 10/10 scores, win Game of the Year, and look visually stunning. Naughty Dog doesn't make bad games.
But we have to stop pretending that this level of quality requires this level of sacrifice. It is a choice. It is a management failure. And right now, it looks like Naughty Dog is sliding right back into the bad habits that made them infamous, armed with a spreadsheet and a pocket full of cringe-worthy coins.