“Crunch”. It’s a term we’ve heard all too often when it comes to the development of AAA games. Thankfully, we’re getting to a point where studios are now actively making decisions to avoid having devs fall into crunch mode, and that includes Naughty Dog.
In an interview with ComicBook.com, Naughty Dog co-president and director of both The Last of Us games Neil Druckmann explained why the studio hasn’t revealed their next project for the PlayStation 5. The simple answer? To avoid “work-life balance issues” caused by announcing games “too early”.
Naughty Dog as a studio has had quite a bit of experience when it comes to issues around work-life balance, with titles such as Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Part 2 both finding themselves falling into crunch periods after being announced years prior to their releases. This has now led to Druckmann making the decision to wait until closer to their new projects’ release date to make any big announcements.
“You’re right, we did announce Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Part 2 way in advance, but that actually caused a little bit of the work-life balance issues that we’ve sometimes had at the studio,” Druckmann says in his response to ComicBook’s Logan Moore.
“By delaying that announcement a bit, we could play with the schedule more and we’re more conscious now about how we’re approaching production. So there’s our [The Last of Us] multiplayer project and there’s another project, that I will not say anything about that’s beyond that, that we’re also very much excited for.”
As Druckmann mentions towards the end there, Naughty Dog currently has two projects in the works, one is the Last of Us multiplayer game announced at last year’s Summer Game Fest and the other is a mystery. It sounds like we probably won’t hear much about either of them until they’re closer to gold, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.
The issue of work-life balance in the gaming industry seems to be a very colourful debate topic (based on the many, many comments I’ve read), with folks either giving a shit about it, not giving a shit about it, or being completely neutral about it. Ultimately, gamers rarely agree on one thing.
At the end of the day though, I think any move towards an industry that allows its workers to have a life outside of their job is a good move, but that’s just me!
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