I broke down crying: Canadian video game creators face grueling crunch hours

My fist job was with a company that had also hardware projects and we had a hard deadline to not miss the re-stock of supplies of big retailers. So since management decided to change one of the core features 6 month before the deadline we worked on weekends in exchange for money. I was young, felt very close to the team and also needed the money to pay off my student loan. After a summer without weekends to relax I was pretty burned out and I realized how the money wasn&#x27;t worth it.<p>After working there a while I also realized how the company used the coolness factor of the products and the feeling of belonging to the team to get people into working a lot while paying less than the rest of the industry. I think this is also often done in the game industry<p>My question is: after your first crunch time, don&#x27;t you think about priorities in life? Also, at least the programmers won&#x27;t have a really hard time to find other jobs why do you stay in this rather abusive industry?

It may be worse now, but the computer game industry has long been one of the worst in terms of the conditions that devs work under. It is, perhaps, the most cutthroat sector of our industy.<p>That&#x27;s why I left it -- I can do exciting, impactful, cutting-edge things in other sectors without having to endure death marches and crunch times.

Just work for a small game company that doesn&#x27;t ship products or advertise physically and hence has much less crunch requirement (much easier to delay a digital product). Plus, typically the Owner is working himself as a designer or programmer, so any crunch for the team means crunch for him.<p>With the launch of the Epic Games Store and the coming explosion of platforms, plus mature middleware like Unity and Unreal, times are great for well-organised Indie teams.