There is another problem with crunch. Sometimes (often?) the production schedule is so mismanaged that I really don't want to ship anything under it. And neither does the entire team. We know the game will be very underwhelming, critically panned and heavily refunded if we did not crunch to make it better. And we want something we spend years of our life on to be good. Everyone wants to not throw years of their life down the toilet.

I worked in some companies where we went from milestone to milestone in a formal crunch. This means that everyone was already expected to work (unpaid) weekends. But still, the product wasn't coming together at the rate it needed to because there wasn't enough time/staff. So some of us worked for 16 hours a day, too. Just so that we could turn it into something good against management's wishes.

Unfortunately, at the end of all this, at least some developers realize that you have to let the proverbial sick dog die. We burn out one by one and then there's not enough of us crunching to deliver a good product. Then HR opens the flood gates for a moment and all the burnt-out staff are replaced with eager fresh crunchers. Anyways, that's my story of becoming the jaded lead with some semblance of a work/life balance. And the moral of the story is that at some point, it's water under the bridge. A production that is run this way cannot be saved by work hours taken from our health, our children, our families, etc.