In 2004, the partner of an EA employee wrote about the conditions her significant other was working under during a particularly brutal crunch period. He worked 9 am to 10 pm seven days a week, "with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior." No overtime pay or other compensation. No deadline for when this would end.
He was not alone, and subsequently others spoke out about similar conditions. There were class-action lawsuits, which EA chose to settle for millions of dollars. In the 15 years since, the conversation about crunch in the games industry has spread beyond whisper networks and isolated exposés, becoming much more common. Developers have been emboldened to speak out about conditions at other employers, from Rockstar to Telltale to NetherRealm. But crunch remains a serious problem.
Recently, another story has become intertwined with crunch: Developers aren't just being worked into the ground to hit a development milestone or a release date, because for many games that's just the starting line. Living games demand a constant stream of content, and only constant work can deliver it.
https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/the-pre...s-is-pushing-the-industry-to-a-breaking-point
Interesting article by PCGamer and I think that many of us noticed trend long time ago. More and more games are becoming GaaS and neither developers or market can't sustain constant influx of them.
Over the years consumers were slowly trained to stay with the game longer and longer so more money could be earned from same release. And now that is slowly starting to backfire and consumers are now starting to demand more and more content for same release. And answer is pushing developers to do more.
And we don't need to look far to see where all of this is going. It is enough to look at YouTube personalities and Twitch streamers in past 10 years to see how many of them just simply got sick of it and abandoned their work.