going by the extremely low quality of mass market/AAA games, videogame developers are overpaid and underworked... imagine being a dev and complaining about having to do your job AT ALL for once which is what they talk about when they whine about "crunch"
You really, really lack an understanding of just how toxic the game development industry is.
Take Ubisoft. Sexual harassment and casual racism (such as watching the Force Awakens trailer and referring to John Boyega as a monkey) were considered normal. Veteran members would host meeting in strip clubs, designed to unnerve and intimidate the new members into accepting their way of thinking. Sexual and mental abuse was considered the norm, and largely accepted by the higher ups. That eventually claimed the scalp of Serge Hascoet, their Chief Creative Officer. Yves Guillemot, President and CEO, claimed he didn't know a thing, but I find that hard to believe consdiering him and Hascoet were very close friends. This is without mentioning that the entire HR management team threatened to resign if the internal audit found them responsible.
Oh and did I mention that when developing their newest Tom Clancy game, they turned their version of BLM, complete with raised fist symbol, into the tool of a global conspiracy to destroy democracy? They somehow managed to turn a movement protesting police brutality into a shadowy global conspiracy, offending both the black and Jewish communities both at once! They then had the gall to say they had no idea of the raised fist's significance, when it's been a symbol of civil rights movements throughout US history.
There are many, many more horror stories like this. Rockstar forcing its writers to work 100 hour weeks on Red Dead Redemption 2, CD Projekt Red forcing its workers to work 16 hours a day six days a week under threat of termination if they don't, or Activision laying off 800 workers days after announcing record profits and incresing CEO Bobby Koitck's own salary.
To anyone-ANYONE-interested in worker representation and making sure employes get a fair deal, I strongly urge you to look into this. The game industry is a massive hive of worker exploitation, sexual, emotional and mental abuse, and people actively covering all this up to protect the corporate heads' positions and salaries. It is an issue the media simply does not cover, and because so many want to get into game development, studios can literally fire entire sections of the workforce if they get a hint that section is organising. Unions simply do not exist in the game development sector, or if they do, they have no power to effect lasting change.
Please, anyone interested in fair treatment of employees, I urge you to study this more closely. The New Gilded Age is here already, and it's being spearheaded by game development studios.
