Right but that's not always true, is it? There was such a huge backlash for rockstar and their overtime on RDR2, but I know people at Rockstar, the bonuses are insane and people there work themselves so hard hoping for that bonus. Isn't that the same in the finance industry? Work really really hard to maybe get in that crazy pay bracket where you're basically sorted.

I'm not particularly trying to defend the games industry here, I'm just curious why the popular culture lately is so keen to cover the hard work being put into games but not into other industries which work even worse hours.

I presume on the average finance industry employees are better paid than gaming industry, though. At least stereotypically your average banker is a well off professional whereas the game industry stereotype is closer to the abused creative industry wage slave (who needs unions?).

RDR2 was a guaranteed hit. Even if it sucked, it still would have sold a million copies. R* could have delayed it by a year a la Cyberpunk and still been fine.

The fear is when you’re in a company where your project might lose funding if you don’t complete eight months’ worth of work in two months time. That’s when the games industry goes from abusive to masochistic.

I think you're just projecting what you're familiar with. People who know people in investment banking (or big law) are very familiar with practices there and there are also any number of books that have been written about it.