Same here. I am known as one of the fastest devs and I am always the customer point of contact as well as the lead.

It always comes down to better project management. I know game studios have outside pressures due to market demands, however, if the project was managed with appropriate time tables that management could expect and understand why, you wouldn't have to crunch to catch up as you'd have a realistic timetable to begin with.

Reminds me of the Japanese experience where if reporters visited places like Polophony digital there would be photos of sleeping bags rolled up under the desks because they slept there, It seems at first like wow what a work ethic and looking at the great games some of these companys turned out at the time ,maybe this is whats behind it all,but now many in the Japanese games industry are lamenting that these same work practices are behind the fact that employee turn over and burnout is starting to be a grave concern.
Another thing is how much of this crunch time is due to publisher pressure, since companys like Valve that control their own destiny don't seem to have these problems.
Australia has quite strong work place practices code and nobody seems to have put in any official complaints so maybe it isn't as bad as it looks from the outside ,it may just be just a one off situation and with La Noire being such a success that seems likely.
to the person who say they would love a job any job and to toughen up there is allways some one who would under cut you if you let them but having some one doing it for a $1 a day isn't going to get you very far

I don't think you get biology.

One woman cannot make a baby at all, there needs to be a man as well.

3 women still cannot make a baby, but they can make a video that'll keep a whole bunch of neck-beards very happy on those long, lonely nights.

OT - Pachter has more of a point than usual, programming in general cannot really be done in a 9-5 fashion. There are times when you need to pull all nighters or light nights, fueld by mountain dew and cheetos. If you want a 9-5 job, Pachter is right that game development probably is something you should stay away from. Of course, this needs to be taken into account in the overall pay shceme - either the workers need to be getting paid overtime, or their agreed upon salary should be high to take into account these crunch times.

I'm not commenting on specifics of this case everyone is talking about, I know nothing about it.

Sure is easy to criticize the people in the industry when you sit back in a office making video's for gametrailers.

i have no problem with this as long as the employees are rewarded for there efforts.

I want to get into the games industry and i understand the hours are long, its not a glamorous as it sounds and its hard work and nothing is easy.

But the thing with the games industry is that most love what they are doing and are willing to work overtime and long hours and aren't doing it for the money either.

I guess the reason of this is because of the upper management always give harsh deadline. Maybe because they don't understand how thing's going in software development or they just don't care at all. It happen in many software house in my country. They just love to give an unreasonable deadline, for example, company have the project for a year, it reasonable deadline if they just do one project at a time, but they also give another big project in that time of the year. And of course, they hope all of them finish in that year. See how good is that? The fact is, in my country, it's not only happen in game development, but also in another software development area.

Additional notes,  we also don't get overtime bonus or yearly bonus or project bonus or even share...... a.k.a no reward at all. Sometimes, they also think we can't do our jobs right if there is just a small bug....

lol i don't get how anybody would accept working overtime for free!! we are humans not machines..

God forbid that anyone expects a company to treat their employees like human beings. I mean, where do we get off?

Indentured servitude FTW! Who's with me?

those all nighters are typically the times where the worse technical decisions are taken and the most bugs are introduced into the code...