You're 100%, most everyone working in the games industry could easily make more in any other job, but anyone working in the games indoustry and is working there for the money is doing it wrong.

I agree that crunch sucks and in a perfect world we could plan things better and plan as well as any competent software development company but it's far from a perfect world.  Anyone here knows that the smallest bug in a demo gets blown out of proportion, the smallest quirk can mean the different from an 8.0 game and a game that is below an 8.0, and how important it is for a game to look as good as possible.

If people expect those things, publishers are going to have to pay more or just expect their developers to crunch.  I can easily tell you who will win that argument, or at least who will win in the long run.  It's just one of those sad facts.

Games are 2+ year long projects involving hundreds of people across varied disciplines in an every changing market.  Most software development doesn't have to deal with that (and my wife is a project manager and works solely at software and web development companies, she knows what goes on there and cringes at the stories I tell her, I get the differences).  I'm not trying to make excuses for why we crunch or trying to say it's good, it's just the way things are.

It does increase the time more than that though, that's the thing.  It's not as simple as you're making it.  Not only do you have toworry about the handoff, but there's the overhead of housing, training that employee, general lost time in the day (in any given 8 hour work day, a person generally only works 5 hours), and more.  You're trying to argue against a proven philosophy and you're just not going to win that one. 

Adding more developers would decrease the time, but it doesn't always decrease it in a way that always makes it worth it.  Also, remember, salary employess don't generally get paid overtime at all.

The only software companies out there that are struggling are game developers...

Maybe those companies should get the hint.

Pay your employees, less, exploit them more and you won't get the cream of the crop or the best software  developed in a reasonnable amount of time...

Fully read my post next time please 

Considering I've always been a top peformer in work, won tons of awards, merit $ bonuses, yearly bonuses, raises, higher than average yearly % increases... I think you're simply in the wrong company.

I'm going to agree with you.

Most people don't understand that software is an area where depending on the skills of the persons, the productivity and the quality of the work performed can vary greatly and most of it has little to do with the time actually spent...( don't ask me to build the architecture of a complex product, but give a bugged software and I will find and fix the bug faster than most , even if I don't know the code at all, same if you ask me to improve the performance of a piece of code, a lot of it has to do with intuition and it's not something you teach or learn...).

I agree with Pach on this one. The devs should have known what they have gotten themselves into. Being a game dev, i guess, is not really a job a person should strive for to make a good living. Its a job that a person is passionate about, a job where a dev is willing to stay longer (take naughty dog devs for example). I have been volunteering at Baylore Health Care System for the past couple of weeks and my mom is also a doctor- the one thing i learned from both of them is that becoming a surgeon will NOT give you a good living. You will always be on call since the US has a shorthand of surgeons, the new health care bill will cause the surgeon to be paid less, and you will be working many hours a week. Yet the surgeons continue to do their job because they want to wven though they could have easily become dermatologists. The game devs at bondi need to learn a thing or two about that. or just find a new job. like eBay! I made $2000 by just sitting at home selling stuff on eBay which i didn't even have to ship :)

cry babies.

i'd kill for a job, let-alone overtime pay! there lucky they'll even see a bonus. those fools new wht they were getting into before they signed to the project. they lucky the game came out good, and had good sales and reveiws.

don't complain now that your in the spotlight.

By the way, there was an article a couple of years ago in game developers where the arguably the most successfull game developer these days was explaining ( through the voice of his VP of development) that they don't do crunch anymore and that they found those to be globally counter productive....

I'm talking of Blizzard Entertainment of course...........

So no, you do not have to have crunch to produce profitable software, even in the gaming industry...

If the guy sitting in the next cube takes 60 hours a week to do what I do in 35, I'm not the one that will be getting a bad performance, he is, that is how things work... ( I am one of those that put the lowest hours ( I take a 1h30 lunch break every day lol) and I had the highest salary increase of my team last year...)