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I think from the start, game journalists have been going about the crunch issue all wrong. Attacking the existence of crunch is silly because literally every job with deadlines has crunch, and they probably always will. Hell, I worked in flooring and often had to work 50 hour work weeks to get jobs done in time.
The problem arises in the working environment. If you are going to make, or even ask people to work beyond 40 hours, you need to create a workplace that people feel comfortable doing that in. Ideally you should strive to create an enviornment that makes people want to work extra hours.
And so the problem with crunch in gaming has never been that it exists, but rather, that a lot of companies create a miserable hellscape at their workplace, that make people want to eat a bullet, rather than be there any longer than they have to.
It IS a slippery slope, and it's not surprising that companies which treat their customers like shit also treat their employees like shit. But until a bunch of CD Project Red employees come out and give detailed accounts of dark ages style work conditions, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're doing everything they can to make the overtime as painless as possible while doing what needs to be done. They've earned that trust.
All that said, dude should never have made that promise. You never know what kind of issues and delays might pop up. But at least he's got the balls to come out and take full responsiblity for it.
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