A former Naughty Dog employee claims a more experienced team would have completed The Last of Us 2 a year before

The lauded Naughty Dog team from the Uncharted and The Last of Us series has been criticized for its overtime culture.

Kotaku Portal recently published another research article, signed by Jason Schrier, that reveals the working practices of the esteemed Naughty Dog studio. The creators of Uncharted and The Last of Us portray themselves as perfectionists in this article, which implies that they will work overtime to make the game as good as possible.

It is not forced overtime, but it is a practice that has caused up to 70% of employees who have worked in previous games to leave the studio in the last four years. The question therefore arises as to when such a mode will be sustainable and whether a culture of perfectionism will ultimately destroy Sony's strongest studio.

From Kotaku's article, based on an interview with 13 former Naughty Dog employees, we learn that there was an initiative to change overtime in the case of The Last of Us: Part 2. However, those plans ultimately failed because game development didn't go smoothly but developers changed various characters and mechanics after testing that they were not attractive to players.

Following the publication of Kotaku's article on the subject, Jonathan Cooper, a former Naughty Dog animator who has heard a number of additional criticisms of his former studio, also appeared on the subject. According to Cooper, working practices at Naughty Dog have made them no longer the best in the industry because of overtime, they have a terrible reputation for not being able to hire experienced animators for their projects. For this reason, they even hire animators from the film industry, mostly young talent, who then need twice as much time to develop games as they would need to have experienced people.

Cooper says a more experienced team than Naughty Dog would have completed The Last of Us Part 2 a year ago, and that the only reason why they are still considered successful is because Sony is ready to invest a huge amount of money in their projects, money that covers all focus group testing and additional work resulting from it.