Naughty Dog’s history with crunch is well documented, and the Last of Us developer is reportedly working late hours again while working on its upcoming PS5 sci-fi action game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The studio even acknowledged this in a documentary about the development of The Last of Us Part II, in which it seemed optimistic that this systemic issue within the company was finally being resolved. It’s become clear since, however, that this is just how Naughty Dog operates, and former senior game designer Benson Russell has given some insight into why he believes this is still happening while the studio is working on Intergalactic.
In an interview with YouTuber Kiwi Talkz, Russell talked about how crunch was ingrained into Naughty Dog’s workflow, especially after the development of the first Last of Us game.
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?” And eventually, it was just an admission in the meeting, it was said, “well, 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.”
Obviously that was over a decade ago, and long before the company’s attempts at mitigating crunch after The Last of Us Part II launched in 2020, but Russell talks about how part of the reason this keeps happening at the studio is because it tends to treat internal deadlines with the same weight as external ones. Russell points out that this is similar to what was reportedly happening with Intergalactic back in December as the team was crunching to finish a demo for Sony to review, despite the game aiming for a 2027 launch. Russell says that these goalposts were typically put up when the studio felt it had “wandered too much” and needed to solidify the game it was working on.
In the Last of Us Part II: Grounded documentary, Naughty Dog said it was working to eliminate crunch and trying to fix the studio’s reputation as one reliant on the practice, including hiring producers who were explicitly brought on to fix the studio’s workflow. However, Bloomberg’s December 2025 report on Intergalactic’s development states that many of them had already left Naughty Dog, and now the studio is reportedly falling back into old habits.