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 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.

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