Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is Naughty Dog’s Most Expansive And ‘Maybe the Most Expensive’ Game The Studio Has Ever Made

Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will be the studio’s biggest and “maybe” most expensive game ever, with creator Neil Druckmann hailing the new project as the “most ambitious game we’ve ever made.”

“What can I say and not say? I can tell you we’re in the thick of it. We’re making it, we’re playing it. We’re firing on all cylinders,” Druckmann told Variety in a new interview. “I’ve said this before, but I really mean it, I’m really feeling it right now: It’s the most ambitious game we’ve ever made. It’s the most expansive game we’ve ever made, maybe the most expensive, by the time we finish it.”

And with both The Last of Us and Uncharted getting live-action adaptations, Druckmann — who recently announced he will not be creatively involved in the upcoming Season 3 of HBO’s The Last of Us — was keen to stress that while he didn’t want to “put the cart in front of the horse” and is keen to ensure Intergalactic is “a fantastic video game first,” another Naughty Dog game could become a movie or a series if he has “the right partnership.”

“I’m sure if Intergalactic is successful, you will see it again,” he added. “Whether that will be our next game right after that, I can’t say, and I leave that door open.”

The cost of AAA video game development, including first-party Sony games, remains one of the hottest topics within the industry. Microsoft’s answer is to go multiplatform with its Xbox games, releasing them on rival consoles as well as PC. Sony is late to the party on this front, refusing, for the most part, to release its PlayStation games on PC at the same time. However, it has shown wriggle room on that front recently, with its live service games like Helldivers 2 coming out on PC at the same time as PS5. Helldivers 2 even ended up on Xbox in what was a first for Sony.

As former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America Shawn Layden has previously said, when a video game’s costs exceed $200 million — as it sounds like Intergalactic will — “exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel.”

“It reduces your addressable market,” Layden said at the time, citing the success of Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2. “Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in. In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% of those people will never spend a nickel. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open.”