I wholeheartedly agree, crunch is damaging to any industry over extended periods of time. It doesn't matter if you're a game developer, web developer or architect, crunch affects everyone. It is an outdated way of thinking that the game industry has failed to let go of that the more people and effort you throw at a problem, the quicker it gets solved.

The more hours you throw at a problem in my experience as a developer, you end up with more problems than you started off trying to solve. You lose focus, when you lose focus things that were once obvious are not in your peripheral vision and you make mistakes. It is akin to driving a vehicle tired, you are more likely to be in an accident.

Sadly the gaming industry is notorious for this kind of behaviour of expected crunch. Yeah, you push yourself to get out a game, but then what? You start working on another new game or DLC for the current game and you find yourself working 80 hour weeks again, what was the benefit of those long hours other than keeping your job? It is a repeating cycle.

People have been decrying the crunch in the gaming industry especially since the 90's and yet, nothing ever changes or improves. Someone writes a blog post or article, people unanimously agree things need to change and then it all blows over until the next article comes along. What's it going to take: a spate of sleep-deprived, stressed game developers taking their own lives?

I accept the fact that avoiding crunch altogether is unavoidable in any industry, but we need to better manage it. We need to have a framework in place that prevents people from being expected to work 80+ hour weeks for years on end. Sometimes you need to put in some extra hours to finish a project, that's cool, just don't factor it in every time, expect it for months or years on end and above all: don't forgo compensation for the sacrifice your employees are making under the guise of "we need to do this"

Look at mostly every single AAA game released in the last few years, more issues than you can poke a stick at. Look at GTA V, when it launched people couldn't even play the multiplayer component, same thing happened to the highly anticipated and hyped Destiny and pretty much every insert game name here - is it the fault of the developers who were enslaved to complete the game? No. It is the lack of resources, lack of care for sane work hours, lack of compassion or concern for employees that causes large games with budgets that rival Hollywood movies to fail spectacularly on launch.

When is the last time a large company like Rockstar Games or Electronic Arts released a game that wasn't broken or buggy to some extent on launch? Besides having an extremely generous budget to hire the best and produce something spectacular? I can't recall a time that happened in the last few years. Perfection is not a priority, churn and burn is the name of the game. Get it out now as long as it is complete and we'll sort out the bugs with a patch shortly after launch. Oh, and hurry, the investors want to see a quick profit on this one.

Some of you might recall the famous post from an anonymous blogger by the name of EA Spouse. A wife of a video game developer working at Electronic Arts pouring her heart out over the toll his long hours take on him and his family, the excessive work hours he puts in: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/ - large publications lapped the story up, people were outraged and yet here we are in 2015 reading another article about long hours. Things will not change until something bad happens (and probably not until it starts happening frequently).

We've been talking about things needing to change for far too long, but nothing ever seems to get better.