The Summer Games Fest has come and gone, and despite some great showings, one sore absence left many puzzled. Where was Naughty Dog’s presentation, PlayStation’s ace in the hole? Well, turns out the explanation might be simpler than you think.
I’ve seen a few pieces wondering about the radio silence coming from Naughty Dog regarding Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, their most recently announced game, which the company showed back in 2024. It seems like these pieces might actually be part of the problem, as ex-Naughty Dog artist Del took to Twitter to explain.
It turns out that making one such trailer might delay a game’s development by up to four months. Del clarifies that the trailer doesn’t take four actual months to shoot and edit; it’s the disruption from the resource shift that stalls development for that long.
“Then you can have a period of intense focus where parts of the team temporarily pivot away from building the core game. Artists gotta create bespoke assets. Engineers are hacking together functionality that only needs to work in a controlled environment. Designers have script moments that sell the fantasy that takes so much iteration to get right. QA has to maybe validate a slice of the game that may not represent the wider experience. Because you can’t showcase something that looks well but doesn’t play well, (and then you’re stuck with bullshit that looked good in a trailer). For a month or two, a significant amount of creative energy gets redirected toward the trailer.”
Del goes on to explain that things don’t get immediately better after the trailer is released, as it’s also complicated to pick up where you left off, and some people will also have to take time off because they might’ve had to crunch hard to come up with the trailer.
So, even though the demand for a trailer might sometimes actually get fans to see a trailer, there’s a price for everyone to pay. I expected that to be the case, but I didn’t expect it to delay a game for four whole months. That’s an incredible amount of time, one not spent on making the game better in any way, but merely to show fans that, yeah, they didn’t actually forget about that multimillion-dollar project they’d previously announced.
We blame the industry for a lot, which is usually totally warranted, but we cannot forget our roles as consumers. As evidenced by the GTA6 hype craze, our lack of patience towards releases—and even previews now—should become cause for concern, whether or not we care for the people making these games.
