[patrec]

The first part of your answer that sounds intuitively believable, namely that a bunch of chores accumulate by the end of a production cycle and that productivity is not as badly hit, so it might be possible to get more out of people by overworking them (it's not completely obvious though, many of the studies about productivity declines due to overwork I skimmed study tasks that don't seem like they'd obviously suffer more under overwork than art asset creation).

But the other two points are in a way begging the question: I understand that both poor planning and set-in-stone release/marketing windows are endemic in the industry (and that this creates temptation to overwork people to hit a slipped deadline). But if overworking people is generally a net loss in throughput (as a lot of studies seem to suggest), giving in to this temptation ought to be counterproductive and decrease the likelihood of meeting the deadline. Now of course it's not uncommon for people to really persistently, and en-masse do stupid things that turn out to be highly counterproductive -- like seeing a doctor throughout most of human history. On the other hand, given that the practice seems to be both ubiquitous and universally hated you'd think the first major game studio to figure this out would completely crush its competitors in no time. Since this hasn't happened yet, it's tempting to conclude it must provide some advantage.