Finance pays a lot better. Game industry just leeches off from enthusiasm of youth.

Or, to put in other terms: games industry squeezes people who joined the industry for a chance of self-expression whereas finance industry squeezes people who generally joined for the money and the grind.

Squeezing is not nice but at least in finance you know what you got into.

Right but that's not always true, is it? There was such a huge backlash for rockstar and their overtime on RDR2, but I know people at Rockstar, the bonuses are insane and people there work themselves so hard hoping for that bonus. Isn't that the same in the finance industry? Work really really hard to maybe get in that crazy pay bracket where you're basically sorted.

I'm not particularly trying to defend the games industry here, I'm just curious why the popular culture lately is so keen to cover the hard work being put into games but not into other industries which work even worse hours.

I presume on the average finance industry employees are better paid than gaming industry, though. At least stereotypically your average banker is a well off professional whereas the game industry stereotype is closer to the abused creative industry wage slave (who needs unions?).

RDR2 was a guaranteed hit. Even if it sucked, it still would have sold a million copies. R* could have delayed it by a year a la Cyberpunk and still been fine.

The fear is when you’re in a company where your project might lose funding if you don’t complete eight months’ worth of work in two months time. That’s when the games industry goes from abusive to masochistic.

I think you're just projecting what you're familiar with. People who know people in investment banking (or big law) are very familiar with practices there and there are also any number of books that have been written about it.

I suspect it’s to do with the money involved. That game developer doing months of crunch is likely already underpaid (compared with a similarly skilled and experienced dev working in another industry) when one only considers their contracted working hours. The person working similar crunch hours in finance is likely making tens of thousands more. For better or worse people tend to think very little of bankers and the prevailing attitude is that they’re making too much, instead of the more sensible approach that others are paid too little.

The ritual in finance is part of a realistic path to £1m annual earnings in a short space of time.

It does get coverage, often when something terrible happens like an intern committing suicide. But finance has been like this for decades and lots of people are aware of it, it's not news. The games industry crunch-time phenomenon is less well known outside of the software industry.

Also, my impression is that after the EA "wivesgate" thing or whatever it was called, practices at the bigger studios got better. But maybe that's just rumour and speculation. I'd expect long hours at small firms no matter what industry they're in, by the nature of being smaller.

I guess in finance it's cultural knowledge that this sort of thing goes on, there are not many surprises. The work-life balance of the games industry is not so embedded in our collective consciousness.