Video games are a labor disaster
Because these games are so complex, they are often quite unfinished or bug-ridden very close to their scheduled release dates. Video games are constantly delayed, but they cannot be delayed forever, especially if a large corporation’s earnings report depends on selling a lot of a heavily marketed video game. So many studios enter a period of grueling overwork and mandatory overtime. The practice is so common in the industry that it is simply known as “crunch.” A few years ago, one major studio founder actually bragged about enduring 100-hour workweeks in the period leading up to a major new game’s release. Reporting from Schreier and others calling attention to the exploitative nature of “crunch” led many studios to announce new policies banning the practice, but they are self-policing, and crunch in some cases simply may be outsourced to smaller studios, often overseas, away from the prying eyes of American reporters.
After the game is released comes the other problem: Now there is a studio full of expensive video game developers who are no longer developing a video game. (This is one reason why so many publishers develop franchises with annual or semiannual releases, like professional sports titles or war games with dependably high-selling new installments released almost every year.) This can lead to mass layoffs, and, as documented in Press Reset, studio closures, which can afflict even studios that release commercially and artistically successful games.
Irrational Games, creator of BioShock, one of the most critically acclaimed video games in history, was shuttered shortly after the release of a well-reviewed and bestselling sequel, BioShock Infinite, when the studio’s co-founder Ken Levine decided to move on to other projects. Irrational’s parent company determined it couldn’t afford to lose Levine, but the people who actually made his popular games were disposable. In another case, Big Huge Games, a studio Schilling purchased that actually managed to release a game, nonetheless closed along with 38 Studios. Then the publisher Epic Games rescued about a third of its employees to form a new studio—only to close that studio a few months later, meaning the same people experienced mass layoffs twice in less than a year.
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Even though video game workers are highly skilled, finding the next job is far from straightforward. Video game studios are located in cities around the world, with the North American segment of the industry in particular having no clear-cut industry town. The globalized, geographically scattered nature of the games business means it resists metonymy, which not even Silicon Valley can boast. Many workers are forced to uproot their lives each time they change jobs. After being laid off in Providence, Jennifer Mills “moved back to Boston (where she was laid off), then to Texas (where she was laid off), and then to Seattle,” where, Schreier reports, she found some stability, but still felt “looming doom.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/162606/video-games-curt-schilling-jason-schreier
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90% of the project requires 90% of the effort, the last 10% of the project requires the other 90% of the effort.
(Never worked on video games, but I've worked many years in manufacturing and engineering. 
