7 Deadly Video Game Sins - Gluttony

Nothing screams "GIVE ME MORE" louder and more aggressively than the quite frankly sickening practice of crunch development cycles.

These periods of overworking staff to the point of mental breakdowns demand more time, more resources, more of your very soul, all to meet deadlines. Now I know the more cynical among us might read this and say, "well a deadline is a deadline. You wouldn't complain if this was another industry etc. etc." but I must insert two points to this line of thinking. 1) Just because staying late for no pay happens in a lot of other jobs (especially the service industry) doesn't excuse how entirely sh*tty the practice is, and 2) Not many other industries have actively prevented their staff from speaking out about being overworked and not receiving any form of compensation on public platforms.

The sheer act of silencing those speaking out through either peer pressure or company guidelines meant that when the lid finally blew off, it led to an outpour of developers sharing harrowing stories of what they went through. These people make our favorite titles, they bring our fantasies to life, and yet thanks to deadlines decided often outside of their control, they are sometimes forced to work for weeks, months even, at levels far above the stress we endure in other jobs.

And this is to say nothing of awful, gluttonous practices shown by the likes of Gearbox who recently were outed as having promised bonuses to staff upon completing a rough development period for Borderlands 3 and then not delivering on this. To work your staff ragged is one thing, to then keep the dragon's share of the bonuses back afterwards? That's plain gluttony.