Indie publisher Devolver Digital is releasing a new Super Nintendo game that looks to raise awareness of video game development crunch, with all its profits going to a mental health charity.

Game developer Shane Neville is no stranger to crunch. He claims that while he was at Electronic Arts in the late ‘90s, he once worked nearly four months without a day off, averaging 90 to 110 hours per week making Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed. Eventually, after seeing the toll it took on him, he swore off…

Crunch is one of the gaming industry’s biggest issues. Devs work countless extra hours to get games out the door, wringing themselves dry of blood, sweat, and tears for weeks or months at a time. It destroys people. Development studio Neocore was reminded of this when it announced earlier this week what it planned to…

There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about fairness and transparency in the video game industry. On Kotaku Splitscreen, we speak with a studio head who takes things to the extreme, paying every employee the same exact wage.

Reports in three separate French outlets depict a pattern of inappropriate behavior, sexist and homophobic jokes, and an overall toxic environment at Quantic Dream, something the video game studio’s executives strongly deny.

There’s an article in the New York Times today about crunch in the video game industry and how it destroys people’s lives. The writer seems like a real jerk, but the op-ed is worth reading.

In February of 2011, fresh off nine months of 80-hour work weeks, Jessica Chavez took a pair of scissors to her hair. She’d been working so hard on a video game—14 hours a day, six days a week—that she hadn’t even had a spare hour to go to the barber.

Is mandatory overtime an integral part of game development or a systemic issue that should be completely eliminated? Where would you even start?

This weekend on Venturebeat, game industry veteran Alex St. John published a hot new contender for worst article of the decade, arguing that today’s game developers should stop whining about nonsensical ideas like, oh, “fair wages.”

Today, more people than ever before are playing video games...but most people still don’t actually understand how games are made. Even for hardcore game aficionados, game development remains fairly shrouded in mystery.

It’s hard to understand what really goes into game development until you’ve heard the stories firsthand.