Benson Russell says the studio’s release structure is “absolutely not” sustainable and that Intergalactic may be repeating a Last of Us Part II problem. He also thinks seven-year projects can be five.
Naughty Dog has not shipped an original game on PS5.
That is the observation Benson Russell built the rest of his argument on, speaking to FRVR. Russell was a senior game designer at the studio, working on The Last of Us, Uncharted 4, and The Last of Us Part II, and now consults on production schedules.
Asked whether the studio’s current release structure is sustainable, he did not hedge. “No. Absolutely not,” he said.
What Russell said about Intergalactic
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet entered active development in 2020, after The Last of Us Part II shipped. It is now in its sixth year with no release date.
Russell’s concern is scope rather than talent.
“My immediate hunch is that it might be another Last of Us 2 situation where you made this decision to put this 10-hour side quest in and it didn’t really fit the story,” he said. He suggested the game “might need to be edited” in that respect.
He traced the impulse to an old studio instinct about value for money, recalling internal arguments along the lines of not being able to charge sixty dollars for a five-hour game.
Why the PS5 generation matters here
Russell framed it as a platform problem for Sony rather than a scheduling problem for Naughty Dog.
“They’re one of the key stakeholders that get PlayStation sold, right?” he said. “So, when you think about it, they have not put an original IP out on this platform.”
With PS6 widely expected around 2028, Naughty Dog is on track for a single new game across the entire PS5 generation, and that game has a real chance of shipping cross-gen.
The math behind six years of nothing
Intergalactic is not the only long project the studio has run this generation.
The Last of Us Online was in development for around seven years and reported at roughly 80% complete when Naughty Dog cancelled it, specifically to free the team for Intergalactic. Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida has said the studio could not have made Intergalactic otherwise.
Add the two together and the studio has spent something like thirteen years of project time this generation. One of those projects was scrapped near the finish line. The other has no date.
That is what “absolutely not sustainable” is describing.
What Russell thinks the fix is
His prescription is a defined vision at the start, which he calls a North Star.
“I genuinely think these seven-year projects, you can get them back down to five,” he said. Without that anchor, he argues, projects accumulate team changes, technical overhauls, and restarts, and the waste compounds.
On AI, he drew a line. “I don’t want generated actual assets,” he said, while allowing that tools for tagging thousands of objects or arranging rooms out of human-made assets could save real time.
Russell has not worked at Naughty Dog for years and says plainly that his read on Intergalactic is a hunch. The studio has not commented, and Intergalactic is scheduled to appear at Summer Game Fest.
Whether six years produces something worth six years is a question only the game answers.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
FRVR, the original interview and every Russell quote in this piece
GamesRadar+ (August 18, 2026), the PS6 timing context and the studio’s release history since 2020
Notebookcheck (August 18, 2026), the North Star framing and Russell’s consultancy work