> Do those extra hours even result in anything productive? I suspect you'd get more done in a regular 40-hour week - but of course it's much easier to measure how many hours you were at your desk than how much you did.
More or less.
There are times when it's more productive than this, usually towards the end of a project when all that's left is bugfixes, polish, adding in special cases here and there to make certain parts of the game more playable/obvious/fun/etc.
But most of the time it's as you said, or even worse. The first couple weeks of crunch you might get 1/1 hours work to hours productive, but after a month or so of 80 hour weeks you're just working 80 hours to get 40 productive hours out of it. If that.
> Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization - but in a parallel to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line, everyone believes they're the best programmer, so no-one wants to do that.
I'm not an expert on unions (by any stretch, really, so correct me if I'm wrong), but I worry this would have a lot of unrelated negative consequences for the game industry, like making it very difficult for indie studios to get off the ground, which IMO would be more negative for the industry than crunch is (if I'm not mistaken about this being a likely possibility).
(Also, it seems very strange to me to separate game and non-game programming in this way. Where is the line drawn?)