In 2020 workers at Naughty Dog, developers of the Uncharted and Last Of Us series, came forward with reports of brutal, 12-hour work days and sustained periods of what's known as crunch:
Many who have worked at Naughty Dog over the years describe it as a duality—as a place that can be simultaneously the best and the worst workplace in the world. Working at Naughty Dog means designing beloved, critically acclaimed games alongside artists and engineers who are considered some of the greatest in their fields. But for many of those same people, it also means working 12-hour days (or longer) and even weekends when the studio is in crunch mode, sacrificing their health, relationships, and personal lives at the altar of the game.
In 2021, in response to those reports, Naughty Dog bosses Evan Wells and Neil Druckmann said they were 'assessing ways the studio can improve', with Druckmann insisting there wasn't one single solution to the problem:
...in the past where we’ve said, “Okay, no working past this hour,” or, “It’s mandatory that no one can work on Sunday,” and they’re always a lot of corner cases of someone saying, “Well, I couldn’t work on Friday because I had to be with my kids. It’s actually more convenient for me to come in on Sunday.” When you try to have a silver bullet, like one solution, you’re always leaving someone behind. That’s why we feel like we need multiple solutions. We have to approach this from multiple angles.
In 2024, in a documentary detailing the production of The Last Of Us 2, Druckmann said, "We now have the goal for Naughty Dog to eliminate crunch", before quality assurance lead Patrick Goss added, "When we onboard people, we tell them that we have a reputation as a studio for crunching, and it's something that we don’t want. And it's something we're not going to do anymore".
In December 2025 (as in, today), Jason Schreier at Bloomberg has reported:
For the past seven weeks, the Santa Monica-based studio behind The Last of Us has been pushing its staff to work long hours to get ready for an upcoming review of the [Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet] demo by its parent company, according to people familiar with the situation. 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, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. This overtime period was an attempt to get the production back on track after several missed deadlines.
Workers were also told to get back into the office five days a week (they had only been required for three). What's notable here is that this cycle of crunch--which lasted for just under two months--wasn't even to finish the game, which isn't due until 2027, but just to finish a demo.
Also of note, from the end of Jason's story:
Earlier this year, members of the production team were each given customized metal coins that seemed to capture, purposefully or not, the current state of the studio’s workplace attitude. On one side was the company’s paw-print logo. On the other, a quote from the trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet: “The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end.”
Cool, cool, cool.
