Is Naughty Dog Studio Crunching itself out of existence?

The video game industry for a number of years now has been experiencing outrage from various corners about the insane number of hours developers have to work to ship games on time.

Naughty Dog Game Studio has for many years been regarded as one of the best game studios in recent memory and this claim is not an exaggeration as the studio is responsible for creating game franchises like the Last of Us and the Uncharted series of games. The studio has received great praise for their work and rightfully so as they tend to push out high-quality games with amazing storylines whenever they decide to embark on creating and releasing of a project. This pursuit of perfection is what drives the mentality at the studio according to insiders but because of this, there exists a duality between excellence and a very high amount of work hours also known as crunching.

The culture of crunch tends to affect the staff of game studio more as they have to bear the brunt of development at the expense of the families, health and mental well being. Prolonged crunch has already damaged the studio in the past with 70% of the lead designers that worked on uncharted 4 leaving the studio. This has led to Naughty Dog gaining a rather unfavourable reputation making it harder for them to recruit skilled workers. This has led the studio to hire juniors from various industries being mainly the film industry to cover the gaps leading to longer development time and delays.

Former Kotaku journalist Jason Schreier has eluded to the claims in his rather enlightening article which outlined the various shortcomings of the studio when it comes to crunch. A former staff of Naughty Dog detailed what it was like to work at Naughty Dog. By stating that:

"You feel obligated to be there later, because everyone else is there later.” - former Naughty Dog employee"

To Naughty Dog credit they by their employees own admissions do try to reduce the stress being placed on their employees by encouraging them to take breaks and by providing food to delaying the game to reduce less crunch but ultimately the underpinnings of the work environment are "get the work done at all cost". The measures taken have been recognized by staff but many still say not enough is being done. Take this account by a current employee at the studio:

"People thinking the extension is somehow to relieve stress or the workload on the team are wrong.” - current Naughty Dog developer"

Regardless of what Naughty Dog achieves in the past if they do not change course soon, they might crunch themselves out of existence.