In my experience crunch is often caused by poor direction, political games, understaffing, under-budgeting other such factors that are crippling to the game qua

In my experience crunch is often caused by poor direction, political games, understaffing, under-budgeting other such factors that are crippling to the game quality. So, naturally, a project that is in crunch is likely to fail in sales and in reviews. The article authors address this, but only at the angle of "Does it help to salvage a failing project?" and I agree with their negative conclusion. Crunching is not going to salvage anything. Why would it? Your publisher changes the requirements every quarter and the game's genre every year, your producers (managers) are busy trying to get each other fired, people are leaving because they think the game is going to suck and they have not seen a bonus in 5 years, you cannot hire anyone because they think the game is going to suck and you don't have money anyway so you could as well crunch trying to ship whatever with whomever is left but crunching is not going to fix these issues. Crunching can only improve a project that does not have any crippling problems. And it usually does (again, from my experience). It works because nobody can schedule 2+ years creative work for 200+ people with such a precision that on the last day of the schedule you check in the last line of code, export the last asset, pack a build and send an 80+ (hell, even 60+) metacritic game to the manufacturing. Game production is an iterative process. The more iterations you make - the better the game becomes in your eyes if not in the reviews. This is why people crunch voluntarily. They want to ship better games.