This is common in the games industry however, especially when a deadline is looming for a game, gabe newell talked about it at valve and voicing some concern over the fact weither they are developer hard deadlines or in house softer deadlines, employees will be there more than 8 hours a day.
Heck i worked in advertising, where you got constant deadlines and usually 3 or 4 deadlines or more at the same time at a smaller companies especially, you will have people putting in 10 11 hour days to get something done that has to be done at a specific time, if you are falling behind or need to catch up because in advertising dead lines are absolute 80% of the time.
Heck i guess i should have been complaining fact i was salaried and putting in 9am to 6 to 9 pm on occasion and never got payed for my overtime at all.
Stuff happens when you get hard deadlines is the bottom line, employees often decide how long they work or if they want to work at all, i do not knon many bosses or companies that would order you to stay 10 11 hours a day, but i have put in over 10 hour shifts on occasion, not because i was payed to be there, or because i was told i had to, but i knew my work had to get done.
They really need to branch out if now things that are common in advertising and other professions, are suddenly bad management, or horrible work conditions for the games industry.
But on the bad side games that now take 4 to 5 years will take 6 to 8 years if they can only work 8 hours period. They could very well not impose any deadlines at all and then alot of the rush hurry to get everything done and checked and out to deadline goes away.
But on the other hand games are tons of money invested. I have worked on a few big accounts in the ad field, big ad budgets can run in the millions or 10s of millions, but games are like 30 mil to well look at tor 500 million on that game. The amount of money is staggering, now take all that take the deadline out games drag out longer to make cost more in resources.
There has to be a happy medium especially for artists and the like and lets face it there are a ton of artists in game development. Artists need a certain amount of direction, else they will get too ambitious for their own good, or spend too much time checking and double and triple checking, and tweaking this and that.
And lets not even mention duke nuke em forever, the game that was in some sort of development over the course of 15 years. I think a games industry without deadlines that lead to people working overtime, would be a disaster.
I think the only thing the igda should look at is people stayed because they wanted to and maybe were encouraged by management to do so, or if on the other hand their bosses were telling people you have to work 10 12 hours tonite because...
Then you can suggest that maybe games developers, do 3 8 hour shifts, people having to come in to work on a station that is occupied there is less people hanging around and your working around the clock that way wo people being on overtime or forced into any 10+ hour marathons.
Employees that worked "obsessive" hours, should get payed for their time.
BUt this is not a thing that is only about game developers.
