> If the schedule was right you wouldn't need crazy long hours.
Unless you're making the next GTA6 for which the customer is willing to wait forever, if you increase the schedule so that everyone works fewer hours, then you'll get outcompeted in the free market by game devs from China, Korea and Japan where long hours are not an issue and can get games much quicker to market on lower budgets, putting you out of business.
Games aren't manufacturing. Studios can try, but no one is going to make Elder Scrolls VI feel like ES6 except Bethesda's team, design, and tech. Especially when people doubt Bethesda can do it themselves. Silksong is not something you can outsource to China. Even decent competition can't quite nail that feel people have about The Sims.
Games also aren't zero sum either. Turns out consumers can buy more than 1 game a year.
Unfortunately, most of those games you named are labours of love, and do not bring as much revenue per dollar spent as shitty mobile gambling slot machine games.
And those are what's available as work these days, but has increasingly been outsourced to cheaper locations. Good riddence, but it also means lost jobs.
The original Bethesda staff that worked on your favorite franchises doesn't work there anymore, they all retired or moved on to greener pastures and the studio, just like EA, Ubisoft, etc is full of clueless underpaid and overworked juniors that don't have the skills or eye for detail the original staff had. Here the Chinese and Koreans will eat you alive.
>Games also aren't zero sum either.
No, but the hours in a days is a zero sum. People have the same free time after school/work to play games, this doesn't grow with the market. So they have to carefully pick what games they'll spend their time and money on. And if it's between some Western slop or an Asian game that's better and cheaper, they'll pick the latter. The more competitive the gaming market is by international players, the more western game studios will be squeezed out.
Humans are humans. I'm betting the workers in Asia doing 80+ hours are equally as weary as the ones in the West. What's the burnout rate? It's expensive to replace a developer halfway through development as it takes forever to get up to speed on both the codebase and the game design.
>I'm betting the workers in Asia doing 80+ hours are equally as weary as the ones in the West.
Of course, but workers in the west also have strong economy and a lot of other better choice than working in a sweatshop. Workers in Asia do not , that's why all offshoring goes there.
They are starting to outcompete Hollywood on quality (see Godzilla minus one, Squid Game, Parasite, etc), they just don't have the hundred millions of dollars of marketing budget that Hollywood has to push and advertise their movies in foreign cinemas across the world, nor do Americans have a huge appetite of watching movies with subtitles, nor could they read even if they wanted to ("54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level"[1]).
Unless you're making the next GTA6 for which the customer is willing to wait forever, if you increase the schedule so that everyone works fewer hours, then you'll get outcompeted in the free market by game devs from China, Korea and Japan where long hours are not an issue and can get games much quicker to market on lower budgets, putting you out of business.