A number of high-profile game studios are closely associated with crunch culture, and The Last of Us maker Naughty Dog is undoubtedly one of them. I feel confident saying that not only because the studio’s reputation for crunch has been well-established through many years of trustworthy reporting, but because Naughty Dog representatives have confirmed as much explicitly. As recently as December 2025, reports circulated claiming Naughty Dog employees had been forced into mandatory overtime to complete a demo for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and in April, former Naughty Dog senior game designer Benson Russell suggested employees accepted crunch as “what it takes to make games at our level.”
Echoing Russell’s sentiment to some degree, Matt Radford, who was a VFX artist on Uncharted 4 and the Last of Us, tells Kiwi Talkz there’s a misconception online about Naughty Dog’s crunch culture. Radford says the claims of crunch coming from news articles are generally “all true” but may miss details, as it’s also “why we wanted to be there, too.”
“You would feel like, ‘Oh my god, we are gonna work 100-plus hours a week, this is possible,’ and yet we all kind of went there to push, to try and work at the highest level,” he says. “So, it’s always complicated. It’s not as cut and dry as sometimes the news articles make it out, where it’s like, ‘evil corporation demands horrific working hours from their employees.’ It was more like a lot of really motivated people getting together and using a little bit of peer pressure to push everyone around them to make their best work. And yeah, it took a lot of hours.”
Radford then waxes philosophically about the nature of crunch and wonders “is there a correlation between art and suffering,” concluding, “I feel personally that what I experienced is great art has come from suffering.”
His tone throughout is defensive of Naughty Dog’s working conditions, but also admissive. “There was definitely some grueling times, but the results do speak for themselves, and ultimately I think Naughty Dog’s secret is the people, and it’s the way that everyone there is driven. That is why the games are great.”
While I fully trust there are and were Naughty Dog employees happy to put in the time and energy to work exorbitant hours for love of the craft, overtime pay, or both, Radford’s insights aren’t entirely exonerating. He admits to there being some degree of pressure, albeit from peers, being pushed on workers who may or may not have felt the same way about overtime. Crunch, after all, is more complex than the presence of overtime; it’s about how much overtime, how it’s compensated, how it’s offered or enforced, what happens if it’s turned down, and why it’s relied on as a production catch-up.
In other words, if someone does actually want to work 100 hours a week for whatever reason, there should be reassurance from management that the same isn’t expected of anyone who wants the freedom to work fair and reasonable hours, and I can’t conclude that was the case at Naughty Dog based purely on what Radford is saying here.