This is an interesting topic. I would like to see comparisons to other industries. I feel like these terrible business practices are pretty much becoming standard in all industries. It just these practices have been adopted earlier and are more amplified for games for three reasons.
1. It's an entertainment industry. Entertainment has always been the most volatile market possible by its very nature as creative products for mass consumption. Thus the best for the bottom line practices have always determined success. Wrestling is the perfect example for showing how entertainment rewards the shittiest working conditions possible.
2. It's a 'sexy' job. This also ties in with the above as entertainment jobs have always been sexy. These are the jobs you grew up wanting to have or have the air of glamour about them hammered into you since you were young. This always generates an excess supply of willing workers. Ask anyone trying to be a surgeon who would laugh at those 'crunch' hours and laugh because those are their everyday hours and they are getting paid much less. Until what they hit like the last 15 years of their career. That Amazon horror story about the working conditions there from some month back. New tech in general seems to have a lot of these problems.
3. Video games is just about the most man hour intensive field around. This is pretty much unique to games themselves but it makes all these other issues worse. Games just take a lot of damn work and usually an unpredictable amount of work. So in those case you either ask more from your work force or expand it. Let's also not forget the pressures of marketing forcing firm dates on these things.
Even without these things these trends are making their way into the rest of business. The main issue here is businesses no longer have loyalty to their employees. Economics has just panned out in away that shows there is no revenue incentive to investing in your work force anymore. There's no reason to keep someone on for more than 5 years anymore. The efficiency gains of a skilled experienced worker are out weighed by giving them raises and increased benefits to stay on. You can just hire a new person and train them and let go the old guy and at least on paper you'll be keeping labor costs down which must mean a net gain overall.
Which brings me to my final point the plague of locusts that are us, the millenials. We have been trained specifically for this economy. I have not met a single other person in my age group (current and post college) who ever expects to work at any company for longer than 5 years. Most of us even accept that we probably won't even live in the same city for that long either. We'll either have to move to find a job or move for our job. The "entitled' millenials expect nothing from our employers and expect to give anything to our work. Most of us are coming out of college with a crippling amount of debt to make us as desperate as possible. Financial stability seems more like a myth than something obtainable. As far as having a family is concerned most of us just accept that that's not in the cards. Give us a decade or two on the current path and I bet we have a birth rate crisis rivaling Japan.
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