Let's set aside for a moment how callous and entitled that statement could sound to others. That's probably not how you feel or what you meant, but that's very much how it comes across. We're setting it aside. Here's why you, as a gamer, should care about how bad crunch is for us as developers.

First, you say that almost all great games you've played were crunched for. Sure, that's probably true. But consider - how many of the games you thought were bad were also crunched for? The answer is, unfortunately, even more of them. And of the vast number of games you never played? Crunch across the board there too. Crunch comes in when there is more work to do than there is time remaining. Which do you think has more problems near release - games that are firing on all cylinders or games that are a huge mess? It's the messes that crunch the hardest because the messes have the most work to do. Because crunch is so pervasive across the board, it means that crunch is mostly irrelevant to the quality of the resulting game. If anything, the amount of needed crunch is more highly correlated to a game being bad than being good.

Next, consider the tradeoffs of crunch. For as long as I can remember, a large number of developers leave the game industry for other careers after around five years. Crunch is a large part of this - we're burning people out by overworking them. We're killing our social relationships and our health, people can't take it, so they quit for greener pastures. But this isn't just about the dev's perspective. Let me bring it back to why this should matter to the gamer. By burning all of these developers out, we're also nuking all of the potential awesome games, features, content, and technology that these developers could have built once they leveled up. Every time a gamer complains that a new game "is just more of the same" and laments not seeing new or innovative things, consider the numbers of younger devs permanently lost to the crunch monster. That's where a huge amount of innovation is going - it's leaving the industry because we burned them out.

What crunch does for you, my gamer, is it indicates a lack of game quality due to problems during development. It consumes the futures of developers who could have gone on to innovate and come up with really cool stuff. It masquerades as "passion" for work that ends up taking a huge toll on people you've never met. The best games are the best games in spite of crunch, not because of it.

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