Those saying delays just lead to more crunch, that's not an excuse that holds water.
Production schedules are generally meticulously overseen by producers and studio heads. If a delay somehow means more crunch, that's poor management on the producers and studio heads part. The point of a delay is to give developers more time to polish and refine the game.
Let's say you need 1000 extra man hours of work to get your game in a polished state that everyone is proud of. A producer will work to plan out that 1,000 hours of extra man hours over a certain period of time. Unless you're a studio really, really hurting for cash, there is literally nothing else stopping the producer from spreading out those 1,000 overs over a reasonable 8-10 hour work schedule, 5 days a week. Does that mean the game gets delayed? Most certainly. But what it also means is that you don't have workers killing themselves squeezing in that 1,000 man hours in a tiny period of time.
There is most certainly an unspoken pressure on employees that if they don't put in those insane hours, they don't care enough about the product, or they don't have a "strong work ethic." That mentality is toxic, but is incredibly prevalent. At the company where I worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week, it was not so subtly implied that by not doing that work would mean we'd lose our jobs. The "hilarious" irony is that once that crunch time was finished, and the project shipped, we were still laid off en masse. So all that blood, sweat, tears, arguments with the spouse, time lost with family/friends that you can't get back was kind of for nothing. Also didn't help that the game was pretty mediocre and didn't do well anyway, so there wasn't even that feeling of "hey, at least the game is something I can look back on with pride." Instead, I was like, "I wish I had spent more time with my wife, but I needed to pay the bills."
It's bullshit, and a garbage mentality that the industry needs to grow out of.
If the game is so massive in scope and ambition that the company feels it's worth it to fund it/back it, then they should also feel that it's worth it to back up their employees, and create a design schedule that will still ensure quality, without the entire team needing to expend all of their sick and vacation days to recover after it goes gold and launches.
Making video games is hard, and often thankless and demoralizing, and that's not including crunch. One of the things that I appreciate about my job is that we have a People, Product, Profit style mentality when it comes to how we approach our games. The people come first. The people that are making the game, and the people that will eventually play the game. The product is the result of the people, and if the people are going into it passionate, energized, motivated, and in good spirits, the product will reflect that. The profit will come if the product is quality, and a quality product is a result of the various incredibly talented people that put in the work. We still get stressed and frustrated (because making games is hard, as I said before), and we push ourselves hard to make our game the best it can be, but at least we don't have the specter of crunch casting a shadow over us, and even then, our leaders are incredibly adamant about us not overworking ourselves, even when we want to spend some extra time in the office to get "just a little more in there."
So many of us have a kind of PTSD from past experiences at other companies, that it's taken many of us a long time to adjust to a non-crunch life. It's sad, and it shouldn't be this way. It's going to take a massive shift of mindset within the gaming industry, and unfortunately, many studio heads are determined to stick to the "old way" of approaching game development, at the detriment of the very people that make the products they produce.
Delays don't have to mean "more crunch," and I refuse to accept that as an excuse.
