The culture of overwork is deeply rooted in the studio's workflow.
Former Senior Game Designer Benson Russell in an interview with the Kiwi Talkz YouTube channel said that the culture of overwork has been deeply rooted in Naughty Dog's workflow since the first part of The Last of Us. According to him, after each major project, the studio discussed ways to reduce the load, but over time, the management actually recognized crunches as inevitable:
We came to the conclusion that this is how games of our level are created.
Although these statements refer to a period of more than a decade ago, Russell notes that many approaches are still preserved today. In particular, the studio tends to treat internal deadlines as strictly as external ones. This, in his opinion, was one of the reasons for the recent overwork in creating the Intergalactic demo for the internal Sony show, despite the fact that the game is expected to be released only in 2027. Such "checkpoints" are often introduced when the team feels that the development has gone too far without a clear direction.
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