We've all tried methodologies to counter this problem and create a continuous, sustainable pace. Unfortunately there's something deep in human nature that prevents us spreading that effort out evenly from day one.
I do understand there are certain periods where games _should_ release to make more sales, and for most games that's probably true. But this is GTA VI, they can miss the launch window by a month and it'd probably hardly impact their sales.
How do you know? This sounds like an unverified rumor.
You could try to argue that companies shouldn't even start that process until the project is finished. Step 1: finish project, Step 2: book ads/shelf space, Step 3: 6 months later, ship it. But sitting on a finished project for 6 months is like not investing your money for 6 months. A lot of money is lost. Money can comes out of salaries
I thought this would be over by now, I certainly haven't bought physical this decade. Who is buying physical, parents of young kids?
Make smaller promises but make them more often, and shit changes more often. Be clear about features 3-6 releases out, and when and why features get bumped. Companies delivering software are already doing this because they often can't deliver in 6 months and telling the customer it will be in the nest release a year from now does, as you note, make them stop doing business with you, so instead now you can tell them it's just delayed by a few months which they can maybe deal with.
Games don't really work like this, but games also don't seem to really work the same way at all and have different incentives.
Meanwhile we have software devs and artists and product people damaging their mental health and suffering burnout for this. It's a video game. It's not worth it.
Failures of management’s planning are imposed as emergencies on the devs.
It’s happened scores of times. No company is as loyal to its labor as it expects labor to be to it.
And a management failure should not result in unpaid (slave) labor.
You (as an employer) accept one of two things: either 1) scope is reduced when you get closer to the deadline and find that you are behind, or 2) deadlines will have to be moved.
It's not like other industries, or even other software companies don't have deadlines and feature sets they want. And some of them do have a form of crunch that I equally rebel against. (I've never worked at a company where we had several months of crunch, though; at most it was a couple weeks.) They end up doing fine, dropping features from the first release, or pushing the release date out if they have to.
These are video games. No one should be ruining their mental health or getting burned out because a corporation decided they need to ship exactly their vision on a particular date.
Building a piece software for years and then releasing it all in once reminds me of the 1990s. Nowadays we continuously deliver.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 works with that model. Every few months they release a new part of the European map. And every few months they release new truck models.
Two words: overtime pay.
This makes crunches disappear as if by magic.
That's really my point: overtime-paid crunch is still found all over the place. EA, Activision-Blizzard, Sony's studios, Com2uS, 343 Industries (even with "priority zero"), outsourcing groups like Keywords Studios... They all have crunch stories but they also all make use of both overtime-paid roles and exempt salaried roles during crunch time. If overtime pay eliminated crunch, we'd expect to see a stronger separation in overtime-eligible workers not experiencing crunch, and crunch concentrating entirely in exempt roles. Instead, crunch appears in both.
Furthermore, over the last 20 years, crunch has decreased in both. I think that's better explained by things that directly affect the underlying reasons for crunch like changes to production practices (i.e. patching instead of going gold) and better management practices (i.e. less waterfall methodology). On indirect pressures, it's a broader mix with competition from the rest of tech, cultural backlash against crunch, and sure overtime classification changes. Explicit overtime pay increases the cost of crunch and thus incentivizes figuring out how to reduce it, but it doesn't directly reduce it itself, and certainly doesn't eliminate it.
Any OT pay above that is typically negotiated by unions in the current market.
Reclassifying people as exempt in order to eliminate OT pay is a garbage move, though. Something unionization presumably could fix.