You'll find no disagreement anywhere on that point. The nature of the games industry is not based on any rational basis - the overwork is cultural, deeply ingrained, and completely irrational.
People who are overworked for extended periods have negative productivity - you can't throw a rock without hitting a dozen studies that have proven this decade after decade.
This sort of management and process is pure cargo cult - this is the way blockbusters have been made since ages past, so this is the way blockbusters will continue to be made, even if it is woefully inefficient and costs more than a saner attitude about work.
For a long time the regular non-game software industry was a lot like this also, except unlike the games industry there wasn't a long enough lineup of impressionable, desperate young graduates waiting to be drawn and quartered by the executioner inside. Nothing meaningful will change until the supply of people willing to take on this horrible system dries up.
I want to believe you're right. But I fear game industry is sufficiently large and long lived that if you were right, someone would have tried it, come out ahead, and created a new cargo cult cuture. I think that a more likely explanation is that working long hours has huge diminishing returns, but for game development tasks the teams come out a bit ahead. This may have to do with the fact that many of the mainstream games in question have fairly established practices and structure, and a lot of the work is building a huge pile of uninspiring content. Literally modeling rocks and dirt, for example.
> you can't throw a rock without hitting a dozen studies that have proven this decade after decade
Please, throw that rock. We had this discussion[1] and the conclusion was that there is no (known to the participants) solid study relevant at least to "knowledge" work, if not for software development directly.
People who are overworked for extended periods have negative productivity - you can't throw a rock without hitting a dozen studies that have proven this decade after decade.
This sort of management and process is pure cargo cult - this is the way blockbusters have been made since ages past, so this is the way blockbusters will continue to be made, even if it is woefully inefficient and costs more than a saner attitude about work.
For a long time the regular non-game software industry was a lot like this also, except unlike the games industry there wasn't a long enough lineup of impressionable, desperate young graduates waiting to be drawn and quartered by the executioner inside. Nothing meaningful will change until the supply of people willing to take on this horrible system dries up.