I am not sure people outside game industry do not crunch. A brief search shows that the term existed long before the modern game industry or any game industry a

I am not sure people outside game industry do not crunch. A brief search shows that the term existed long before the modern game industry or any game industry at all. Same goes for "overtime" - the term is even codified in laws. I assure you nobody treats crunch as a normal mode: even people who are forcing unnecessary crunch understand that it's something unordinary and often do it just because it is not something normal (to show how good they are at management, to extort a bigger budget, to undermine their political rivals etc). >This may need time and risk that companies that are big enough to be called AAA are not willing to take. Infinity Ward, the original home of $1B+ games, had about 100 people at the time of the split from ATVI and founding Respawn. It's about the same size now as well as the Respawn. Media Molecule is just a few dozens. Size does not make a AAA studio. And you don't even need to show the best practices right at the AAA level - start small and if it's any good people will copy you or, at least, you should be able to grow yourself. >Why two companies you mentioned failed? >I think we can assume there might be more reasons to that than only being Agile Indeed, it would be naive to blame Agile on destroying multi-million businesses. Agile seems to be just a symptom. It could be that the management sees that the development process is failing and tries to improve it with a well advertised technique, for example. Or that some Agile enthusiast gets too much power due to the weakened culture. What I was trying to say is that very few AAA studios practice it now and the ones that did in the past are not in the business any more. Also, there is no single AAA development way. For example, Valve's practices are very different from Bungie's, which are different from the R*, which are different from ATVI's COD teams etc.