The video game software development industry is fundamentally broken in its corporate culture. I simply do not understand where they're finding people who are willing to work 'crunch' 60 to 75 hour work weeks without overtime to ship a game quicker. There is seemingly a near infinite supply of young, somewhat naive people who can be recruited by video game development studios to do so.

I work in a role where there is a real possibility that I might be woken up at 3am by an on-call alert. Or that I might have to work the occasional work week far past 40 hours due to an emergency. But it's in service of a critical infrastructure project (carrier-of-carrier ISP backbone links), not a video game. There is no video game on the planet that is so important people can't work a normal 40 hour work week.

If a video game developer can't build, QA and ship a game with a team of people working normal office hours, then in my opinion their priorities are grossly out of whack.

I have lost track of the number of instances I have seen of big video game development studios treating their employees in an abusive manner.

And yes, I suppose I'm somewhat of a hypocrite here. I bought a used copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for $20 on ebay. I bought a copy of Fallout 4 for $18 on the xbox one game store. Am I contributing to the problem? Very likely.