Yup, left AAA a long time ago. Way more money, work-life balance, and job opportunities available when you leave the game industry. It exploits developers who are initially passionate about the field, and then leaves them in a state where it's very difficult to leave (because it's very specific skills that don't easily transfer to other industries)

If you work on game engines, trading is a fantastic transition since you'll already have high performance C++ experience.

Can you elaborate on this?

I fully agree with you that crunching isn't worth it.

All of this mess isn't because of crunching thou. It was a massive fuck up from the leadership team. No crunching (or lack of) would ever solve it

The way they lied to the media, players, etc. Their intentions were always to lie and hide the facts.

Yeah, I'm so curious about what they were doing for the last 2 years. It seems like the artists have been working on the game for 5+ years: the world is huge and full of interesting and detailed environments. The graphics are amazing (on PC). But it's like the gameplay and open-world systems were written in the last year or two, and it shows.

Yepppp I am way more interested in games than web dev but here I get paid well and have a loose and comfortable schedule / environment. It's a no-brainer.