[saghm]

I've spent the last 5 years or so (out of a career coming up on 11 years at the end of this summer) working on early development for products outside of the video game industry that hadn't yet been at release when I joined the team, and somehow none of them have ever made me crunch. The better question is why companies making video games so overwhelmingly make their devs crunch when it does not seem to happen anywhere close to as often anywhere else in tech even when the release timelines are similar. I'm sure some people might argue that there's something inherent in the economics of video games that forces it, but demands for more fair labor practices have historically always been met with protests that it would be impossible for companies to survive if they were adopted, and yet somehow we managed not to run into total economic collapse by banning child labor, mandating 40-hour workweek, etc. It seems far more likely that management does it because they've been able to get away with it so far, and unionizing is has generally been a pretty effective way for labor to stop letting them get away with unfair labor practices (hence why management is always so aggressively against it).