I think for a lot of these people, they have never worked in any other company and maybe dont even realize work can be done another way. I’d love to ask an actual employee at one of these places: Do you realize crunch time is rare or nonexistent for most other companies? If so, do you stay where you are purely “because games?”
I remember joining a particularly toxic company and mentoring one of the junior guys there. It was his first and only job out of school, and he thought work was simply supposed to be toxic—like this was normal.
Sadly I think it's just that they're young and don't have a lot of responsibilities yet so it's easier to take on the brunt of it.
I know before I went into the industry it was at a point where crunch was widely known. Heck, some people bragged about it like a badge of honor/rite of passage.
A lot of it was maturing and realizing that there are more important things in life then giving every waking hour to a company that may throw you out on the door as soon as the title is shipped(or even sooner).
I mentioned it a little further down the thread but I saw 3 different divorces at the last studio I worked at, largely due to spouses just not being there for each other due to the long hours.
What gets me is that in almost no other industry (besides maybe investment banking) would this mentality even make sense. “Boss had me putting in roof shingles for 16 hours straight with no overtime—it was awesome!” “We had crunch time in the garage for six months where I never saw my family. I’ve finally made it as a real mechanic!” Could you imagine hearing any of that?
Having been in construction for a while, the only difference in attitude is they get overtime. It was well known that you work the first 40 hours just to get to the big money of overtime. There was plenty of bragging about how many hours you worked and how few days it took to frame a house (our record was 2.5 days on a small cookie cutter house we built a dozen times before).
It was also known that you could get a union jobs that paid a little more per hour, but because there was no overtime you made less money (you were not allowed to work overtime, not to be confused with they would illegally cheat your out of your overtime). At the time I couldn't have paid my bills on union a union paycheck, but after overtime I could pay my bills.
Most of the industries that have been that bad have been somewhat curtailed by unionization.
Hollywood is the clearest parallel to the Game Industry, and most of their abuse is stopped by unions, where they exist. The current direct parallel in Hollywood right now seems to be the Special Effects/CGI/computer animation shops which currently have an average lifespan of two years, aren't strongly unionized, and see a similar turnover/crunch as the Games Industry.
I'd hazard to say (and a lot of this is from some undergrad time in an architecture program) that's an additional factor with younger devs.
Undergrad college teaches you to lie to yourself about your productivity.
In the sense that time is equated to value (rather than work product being value). Which I think infects a lot of things.
If the game can't be delivered on schedule, and butts-in-seats time is perceived as valuable by a company, then instituting death march crunch hours seems reasonable.
On the other hand if a company values actual results, and a game can't be delivered on schedule, then it has to make a very different decision: push the schedule or increase people assigned to the project.
I'd argue that the end result of crunch is usually pushing the schedule anyway (because either more work can't get done, or sleep deprived work has more bugs), but I can see how the two perspectives would look very different to management. And explain a lot of dysfunction.
I remember joining a particularly toxic company and mentoring one of the junior guys there. It was his first and only job out of school, and he thought work was simply supposed to be toxic—like this was normal.