In my experience, that attitude is common and not limited to game developers or even programmers in general. American working culture tends to respect those who go above and beyond, or at least maintain the appearance of doing so.

Leadership would say, are you sure? Engineers would basically flip them the bird and say yes. Then inevitably be late.

I get it, estimating is inexact. But there's a clear difference between "I broke this down into little tasks, and I think we're looking at x" and "implement multiplayer? Four days."

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

I once asked, how long to add analytics to your code? (I wrote a one line utility that could bundle up objects and fire them off for you.) The response was "three weeks per event". Guess which part of the code didn't have analytics.

Now, at some level this is leadership's fault. They own the culture, but many of the engineers I worked with in games were the least interested in being a part of a team I've ever seen.

To elaborate on your point, say a programmer and a designer brainstorm an amazing new jetpack feature for the game. They spend a day (when they should be working on less interesting but planned features) on a quick first pass and show it to their PM.

The PM asks how long it will take to complete, they say 3 weeks (2 days of UI/UX time to add the fuel bar, a week to tweak the feel and mechanic, 2 days of FX artist time, 2 days of artist time to make the rocket pack model). The PM says that the feature is unplanned and that is too long, so they say they can cut some corners because they really want the feature in and its more interesting than working on their planned tasks. The PM agrees because he wants the team to be creative and take control and pride over how great their game is.

In the end the feature stays in and takes 2 months of development time since it requires modifications to world collision geometry, each selectable player needs a differently modeled jetpack to fit their geometry, a jetpack upgrade system is added, loot box unlockable color customization gets introduced, bots need to be able to fly too and so pathing and behaviors need extensive modification, a tutorial needs adding, sound effects need designing and adding, QA has to do a pass of finding everywhere in the world that the jetpack can be used to get out-of-bounds and to avoid gameplay trigger volumes, and someone has to triage and fix all those issues. And I realized I probably vastly underestimated... do we slip, missing being part of this quarters revenue and cancelling our ad-campaign or have we just pushed into development hell?

Now they certainly do have unique pathologies related to their "cheap" talent pool churn - the lack of experienced people leads to some shockingly bad mistakes reoccurring, and lack of attention to detail from passion often shows.

Later Civilizations (V and later) for instance often came out with some shoddy AI doing things like pathing algorithms clearly designed before they added the one military unitn one civilian unit per hex limit, spamming absurdly bad trade deals, or deciding the proper thing to do against a technologically advanced power who thanks to game mechanics gives research points for every technology they lack is embargo them over conquest of one militant city-state, making it even harder to catch up.

Whereas the older ones did it with smaller teams and more constrained resources where seeking efficiency had some weird side effects - granted there were also plenty of 'shovelware' examples from the past.

This comment shows lack of historical perspective.

All of these complaints have been hot topics since before the term "AAA game" was invented.

AAA games "suck" (if they do, which the customer base's wallets seem to to think so) because they have gotten too good at making money even against their customers' stated preferences, not because they are bad at anything.