QA often has night shifts, daily builds are tested at night and bugs are logged for the next morning.
That said this is very much a relic of a time when game development was “simpler” and given the production pipeline today I’m not sure if this still makes sense.
I listened to an interview with a former Blizzard QA engineer who goes by Piratesoftware, and he explained that there were night shifts for QA to maximize the number of testing hours before launch.
If only games weren't beholden to the shopping seasons, so they could just release when they are ready. Then this ordeal could be avoided.
I feel like if your game takes 10 years to develop you can just release at the next shopping season surely?
Maybe for things that can't be parallelized any more, e.g. only one designer at a time can work on a specific (complex) asset, but it might be possible to hand over the work to the next shift?