[christophilus]

Don't know why the downvotes. I was once asked to work on the original Gears of War. After talking to the developers at Microsoft game studios, I noped on out of there. Most game devs I've met have horror stories of death marches followed by massive layoffs. It's... not a great sector of the tech industry, if you value work-life balance.

[daemin]

I would hope that the cycle of crunch -> ship -> layoffs is in the past now. From memory it used to be that way because the studio needed to crunch to get the product out the door to sell. Then once that happened they had no need for all of the people since there wasn't another product to work on.

These days there are a lot of studios working on so called perpetual games (MMORPG, etc) which have constant maintenance and improvements so they don't need to let go of people. Also the other AAA game companies are bigger and can shift people between projects as needed.