No Mutants Allowed

It's a mystery. Why would anyone want to work that many hours in a week?

Too many posibilities, professional pressure, emotional manipulation, maybe they are dangling some kind of reward in return to make the devs overextent themselves that much.

Because more evidence is piling up that AAA video game companies are insane.

There's a certain direction we the consumers are pushing the AAA industry: We want bigger worlds, better graphics, improved AI, and by the many-folds. We don't want "a little bit" bigger maps, but WAY bigger maps. WAY more quests, WAY more dialog, we want LOTS of famous actors - etc etc

This means they have to pile on the resources, more more more work-hours, for design and building and artwork and programming and management and administration, paychecks paychecks paychecks, but - and here's the big but, we don't really want to pay much more for it.

Movies work similarily, they're huge investments, but - they get huge returns. "Everybody" watches movies. Far from "everybody" plays games, so you get an industry having to approach a movie kind of budget, but their target audience is a tenth of what movies have