The games industry is notorious for this, yet far from the only industry working against deadlines. Deadlines are a good way to timebox work, but they need to be set in a realistic way rather than an optimized happy-path.

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.

Easy: No one should do unpaid labor. Period. “Crunch time” has traditionally been deployed by games management as a license to free slave labor from game developers.

Failures of management’s planning are imposed as emergencies on the devs.

> How do you end crunch?

Two words: overtime pay.

This makes crunches disappear as if by magic.