Naughty Dog Ends Seven-Week Overtime for Game Demo

Developers at Naughty Dog, a prominent PlayStation Studios team based in Santa Monica, California, have completed a seven-week period of mandatory overtime to prepare an internal demo for their upcoming sci-fi action game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The extra hours, which began in late October 2024 and ended this week, were implemented after the project missed several internal deadlines, according to sources familiar with the studio's operations.

The overtime required staff to log at least eight additional hours per week, bringing total workloads to around 60 hours in some cases. During this time, the studio also enforced a full five-day in-office schedule, shifting from its usual three-day hybrid model. Employees were instructed to track their hours on an internal spreadsheet, and management emphasized that no one should exceed 60 hours weekly. The push focused specifically on finalizing the demo for review by Sony Interactive Entertainment, rather than advancing the game's overall development toward its targeted mid-2027 release as a PlayStation 5 exclusive.

Sources indicate the measures aimed to stabilize production early in the project's lifecycle. Intergalactic,...