Remember when crunch was the gaming industry's biggest open secret? When exposés would drop and we'd all shake our heads and promise things would change? When major studios announced they were eliminating crunch and we believed them?

Yeah. About that.

Crunch culture never went away. We just stopped talking about it. The headlines moved on to other controversies—harassment, discrimination, unionization—and crunch became background noise. The assumption seemed to be that if we weren't reading about 100-hour weeks anymore, the problem must be solved.

It's not solved. I know because I'm still living it. My colleagues are still living it. And I'm tired of pretending otherwise.

The New Crunch

Here's what changed: the industry got better at hiding it. The explicit "mandatory overtime" emails disappeared. The tracking spreadsheets went underground. But the work didn't decrease—if anything, it's increased as expectations around live service content and post-launch support have grown.

What we have now is "soft crunch"—culturally enforced rather than explicitly mandated. Nobody tells you that you have to work weekends. They just imply that your commitment to the project will be reflected in your next performance review. They schedule meetings that make it difficult to leave at a reasonable hour. They praise the team members who "go above and beyond" in company-wide emails, making it clear what behavior gets rewarded.

The result is the same: people working 60, 70, 80-hour weeks. People sleeping in the office because going home feels pointless when you're coming back in four hours. People burning out and quietly leaving the industry because they can't imagine doing this for another decade.

The Live Service Trap

If traditional crunch was about shipping a product, modern crunch is about maintaining one. Live service games—the industry darling right now—require constant content updates, seasonal events, balance patches, and community management. The launch is just the beginning of an endless treadmill.

What this means in practice is that there's no longer a clear "end" to crunch. Old-school crunch had a finish line: gold master, launch day, the moment you could finally breathe. Live service crunch is perpetual. Every update becomes a mini-ship cycle with its own deadline pressure. The emergency patches after major releases. The hotfixes for game-breaking bugs. The seasonal content that has to drop on schedule because players are waiting.

Studios hire more people to handle the workload, but somehow the hours don't decrease. The work expands to fill the available time, and then some.

Why We Stay Quiet

Part of why crunch has become invisible is that we're all complicit in keeping it that way. Speaking up risks your job in an industry with a long memory and few available positions. Even anonymous whistleblowing has become riskier as studios have gotten better at identifying sources from context clues.

There's also shame involved. Nobody wants to admit they're struggling with workloads that "everyone" seems to handle. You look around and see your colleagues putting in the hours without complaint, and you wonder if the problem is you. Maybe you just can't hack it. Maybe you don't care enough about the project. The culture of passion—"we're not just making games, we're creating experiences"—makes it difficult to draw boundaries without feeling like you're letting the team down.

So we normalize it. We joke about it. "How many hours this week?" becomes a competitive sport. The person who slept in their car because they couldn't make it home becomes a legend rather than a warning. Collective trauma becomes bonding material.

The Union Question

I've been asked whether unionization would fix this. I don't know. Unions can negotiate overtime pay, enforce break periods, establish reasonable hour limits—all of which would help. But crunch is as much cultural as it is structural, and changing culture takes longer than changing contracts.

What I do know is that the current system isn't working. The talented people leaving the industry aren't being replaced by equally talented people willing to work reasonable hours. They're being replaced by young developers who don't know any better, who will burn out in turn, who will either leave or become the next generation of managers perpetuating the cycle.

The industry is eating its young, and we're all pretending it's sustainable.

What Actually Helps

I'm not going to end this with a call to action or a list of solutions. I don't have them. If I did, I'd be shouting them from the rooftops instead of writing anonymous articles.

What I will say is this: the next time you read about a studio's "great work-life balance" or see executives talking about how they've eliminated crunch, be skeptical. Ask the developers, anonymously if necessary, what their weeks actually look like. Look at the update cadence for live service games and do the math on how many hours that content requires. Pay attention to Glassdoor reviews that mention hours, even when they're dismissed as disgruntled ex-employees.

The industry wants you to believe crunch is over because admitting otherwise is bad for recruitment and bad for public relations. But crunch isn't over. It's just been driven underground, made invisible, transformed into something we don't have language to describe but all recognize when we see it.

We're still here. We're still crunching. And we're still waiting for someone to actually do something about it.