bitinn, Gonna say it out loud here:
As western video game publishers struggle with their stock prices and lack of investments, firing people became their go to strategy to make quarterly reports look good.
While in the East, companies take advantage of lax labour protection laws and terrible job market to crunch existing workers more.
I have lost many colleagues due to crunch, because they were right, this industry are full of men who had internalized crunch culture and sold it as hard work.