I want to believe you're right. But I fear game industry is sufficiently large and long lived that if you were right, someone would have tried it, come out ahea

I want to believe you're right. But I fear game industry is sufficiently large and long lived that if you were right, someone would have tried it, come out ahead, and created a new cargo cult cuture. I think that a more likely explanation is that working long hours has huge diminishing returns, but for game development tasks the teams come out a bit ahead. This may have to do with the fact that many of the mainstream games in question have fairly established practices and structure, and a lot of the work is building a huge pile of uninspiring content. Literally modeling rocks and dirt, for example.