Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was one of the most interesting surprises to come out in gaming over the last few years — it is the first original project from Naughty Dog since the studio made The Last of Us, so that alone was more than enough to get some heads turning.
News on this particular project have been few and far between, however, but the most recent update might rub people off the wrong way: according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, it seems the studio is pushing for a mid-2027 release of the game and, in order to accomplish that mission, it has ordered employees back to a five-day return-to-office work policy.
Not only that, but it seems Naughty Dog has also implemented a crunch work regime — you know the one: employees working longer hours in order to increase speed of development of any given game. In this case, the studio is seemingly encouraging devs to put in “a minimum of eight extra hours” per week in order to have a demo ready for Sony “after several missed deadlines.”
As is customary for reports such as these, Bloomberg did reach out to Naughty Dog and Sony for official commentary, but neither companies put out any statement. The purported demo was seemingly finalized recently, effectively ending the overtime work period.
According to the report, the RTO demands have disrupted the lives of some of the studio’s employees, given they had to rush to find childcare and other living arrangements, although people were told not to cross the 60-hour-per-week threshold in any way and any extra hours were apparently logged in a spreadsheet.
Crunch work is a bit of a hot topic as it has become a much criticized culture from the corporate side of gaming industry: a lot of world-class studios and publishers have grown used to demand up to 80 hours per week at any given development — in some cases, enforcing these mandates through sheer pressure and lay off threats.
Even though such allegations never quite reached Naughty Dog specifically, the studio’s main executive, Neil Druckmann, has stated in past interviews how the team is “going to” work “very hard”, even joking that the company would have to “put some guardrails in so they won’t injure themselves.”
In another occasion, co-president Evan Wells stated that the team “wants to” work more than 40 hours a week, adding that keeping people in office for this amount of time would frustrate people “to no end” and that “unionizing won’t help.”
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, much like The Last of Us and its sequel, is a PlayStation 5 exclusive offer that puts you over 2,000 years in the future, with players taking control of veteran bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun (Tati Gabrielle). Stranded on a faraway planet called Sempiria, Mun’s original mission was to track down the heads of the “Five Aces” criminal syndicate. The planet itself is off the civilized grid and, legend has it, whoever enters it has never managed to leave.
There are some religious plot elements at play, and loose information about the game mention a cult-like aspect to the overarching plotline, but so far, very little detail besides the above teaser and some screens are officially known to the public.
