I really desperately need well-meaning gamers to stop assuming that the indie side of the industry doesn't have labor issues. Crunch is certainly very common in indie studios. Bad managers are common. Abuse and harassment do happen. Plenty of people have had experiences in indie game development that are just as bad what we hear about from the inside of big AAA studios, but we hardly ever hear about it.
Plenty of indie productions are shambolic disasters fueled by human blood, including some of games that you love. Plenty of people toil away in indie studios being underpaid or mistreated. Plenty of those games aren't even good.
Like yeah Bobby Kotick should be flayed alive or whatever, sure. But let me be real with you, plenty of indie studios are just run like a personal fiefdom and/or harem by some small business tyrant who got a loan from his dad. Plenty of indie studios are, spiritually, a scheme to pay off a steep debt incurred with a publisher by crunching some people into an early exit from the industry (or worse). Plenty of indie studios are shitty little cults of personality built around some guy who bullseyed the zeitgeist once.
I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I would make it into the games industry (beyond making tiny games on my own for a decade and a half) and while it was a wonderful whirlwind of meeting my idols, making new friends and working on fun projects, I also got to find out about the above
now that I'm a streamer, I get a lot of folks excitedly recommending games to me and while most of the time I'm excited to check them out, there's always the moment that comes with disturbing regularity where I have to decide if I respond with "thanks but it's not my thing" or the more truthful "I will not touch anything that studio makes because someone there royally fucked over a friend of mine"
